Youth movement can make Saudi golf look appealing
Players willing to leave the PGA Tour for riches only Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund can provide is a movement Rory McIlroy refers to as the “easy way out.”
Maybe that’s too easy of an explanation.
Even so, it’s hard to dispute the choice might be easier for some players if they consider a trend that has been going on for the last decade, and was illuminated even more when Matt Fitzpatrick won the U.S. Open.
The last five Grand
Slam events now have been won by five different players in their 20s, the first time golf has seen a stretch like that in the 162-year history of the majors.
Fitzpatrick (27) won his first major a month after Justin Thomas (29) won the PGA Championship for the second time. That was preceded by Scottie Scheffler (29) winning the Masters.
Last year’s majors ended with Jon Rahm
(26) winning the U.S. Open and Collin Morikawa (24) winning the British Open for his second major.
Still unknown about
LIV Golf is how the guaranteed riches and 54-hole events will affect the level of play in the long run, how motivated players will be to grind and to practice.
Brooks Koepka joining the Saudi-backed group, along with Bryson
DeChambeau and his fanatical search for revolutionary ways to play the game, cast the lineup of LIV lads in a new light. Both are still in their prime years.
This is no longer the “pre-Champions Tour” that McIlroy called it back in February. McIlroy says he can understand some of the older players going, from Mickelson at 51 and Louis Oosthuizen, who at 39 is coming off a debilitating year of consecutive runner-up finishes in majors.
DeChambeau is never easy to figure except he’s all about being different. Name another player who can prepare for the Ryder Cup and a World Long Drive competition (and do well in both).
Easy money? Yes. The easy way out?
“Hmmm, that notion hadn’t entered my head,” Patrick Cantlay said Tuesday in a manner suggesting he didn’t see it that way. “I think the reasons for different guys going or not going could vary. So to kind of blanket them all into the same decision-making process I think would be a mistake.
“I don’t necessarily think all the guys going over there are saying they have conceded trying to be the best player in the world or the best they possibly can be.”
Ten of the top 12 players in the world ranking are in their 20s. Their average age is 27.25.
McIlroy is the oldest. He’s 33. He thinks his best years are still ahead of him.