Bill Elliott
I don’t know about you lot, but I was really pleased to see the PGA Tour has set aside $40million to reward a handful of players who (their words) “move the needle” across various social media platforms, including, I think, graffiti on motorway bridges.
It’s about time these poor, undervalued souls had their worth recognised and their back pockets stuffed with dollar bills as (probably) reward for paying a team of nerdy social media experts.
Whoever tops the list will cop for $8million. Members of the nerdy teams are unlikely to see any of this.
As significant parts of the world continue to squeal their C19 way to hell, this news certainly lifted the mood in my house. Who, after all, would argue that this bonus is not richly deserved. Sorry? What’s that? You would? Oh okay.
The concept of rewarding those who already have been rewarded hugely more than the majority of their fellow players is both entirely in keeping with the times – vulgar, ill thought out and wildly irritating – and totally understandable. The PGA Tour needs to keep its star players happily on board to prevent them sliding off to join some World Tour thingy that will offer them a zillion a day plus all the jelly beans they want to eat. Or bag up and sell.
This has been billed as a popularity contest, although it is difficult to conceive of anything that would make a player more unpopular with his peers than trousering yet more millions for being successful, which is what this bollocks comes down to.
It is also a reassuring pension plan for the man who seems destined to win it for the foreseeable future. Let’s face it, Tiger Woods can move more needles than all his rivals added together just by putting on an orthopaedic boot and going for a limp.
Take Tiger away and what do we have? Well, we have a big posse of talented golfers, very few of whom are interesting apart from their ability to hit shots we can’t. Is this enough? For me, no. I like to see technically superb golf, love to see fabulous recovery from impossible situations, but, call me greedy, I also like to sense some personality, a whiff of charisma, maybe some wit as well and certainly some sense of how essentially daft the whole thing is anyway.
Woods, for all his faults, has most of these qualities. Few, if any, of the others do. Wee Rory is entirely likeable and for many years was also seriously impressive, but now we mostly wonder if he is going to properly step on to his front foot again. Same with Jordan Spieth, who is toying with our emotions as he takes two steps forward out of oblivion and then one step back.
There are others, of course. Baron Deshampoo is tedious in many ways though hard to ignore, but is he a star? An object of interest, yes, but not yet, if ever, a star. He’s simply too weird. Ian Poulter, meanwhile, was a star but is now a tribute act of his former self, while Justin Rose always has been just too damn nice.
Which leaves us with one man who might, just might, give Woods a run for his big chunk of money. Step forward Patrick Reed, naughty boy and pantomime villain wrapped up in a ‘who gives a toss about you all’ cloak of self determination. If I were in Reed’s camp, I’d be encouraging a loud disagreement with at least two rules officials after making sure there are cameras in the immediate area. Watch that needle move then.
A refined sense of irony demands that Reed wins the inaugural treasure chest, if only because he would then be the most unpopular popular professional golfer ever. Which would be fun for him and many of us. We’ll see.
“Tiger Woods can move more needles than all his rivals added together”