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Sunday marks the final round of the third LIV Golf tournament, in Bedminster, New Jersey, and a field of 12 international teams totaling 48 golfers compete for a whopping $25 million in prize money, much to the chagrin of PGA Tour Tiger Woods , and most of the knee-jerk liberal sports media.
The controversial new tour has attracted dozens of top golfers, from Phil Mickelson to Sergio Garcia, Charles Howell III, Bubba Watson, Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, as well as the excellent golf broadcaster David Feherty. To hear the passionate cries of the golf establishment, these men are sold, cashing in at the expense of human rights and all that is decent in the world.
Are you kidding me?
CHARLES BARKLEY ENDS TALKS WITH LIV GOLF AND STAYS WITH TURNER
The PGA Tour has long enjoyed such high-end American golf monopoly that there has never been a real challenge to its hegemony. As a result, golfers who don’t have the Tiger or Lefty moniker drive from event to event, hoping to make the cut, annually earning as much as a decent second stringer in the National Hockey League. And until recently, the PGA Tour, not golfers, held the rights to NFTs and other means by which players could be paid.
Former United States President Donald Trump watches his shot from the first tee during the pro-am prior to the LIV Golf Invitational – Bedminster at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster on July 28, 2022, in Bedminster, New Jersey.
(Charles Laberge/LIV Golf via Getty Images)
Fans lose when there is a monopoly on golf because most televised events have only a smidgen of big names, so you rarely have the best in the sport competing head-to-head. The competition is weak, the courses are mostly boring, the winners are guys you’ve never heard of, and the overall product of the PGA Tour feels outdated.
Now comes LIV Golf with its parade of the best golfers appearing at every LIV Golf event, thanks to prize money worth competing for, teams organized primarily by nationality to increase entrenched interest, a fast start for lots of action all the time, not cut off, for everyone to play on the weekend, 54 holes (hence the roman numeral LIV) and no guy with the edge hanging around the clubhouse waiting to see if he wins or not. (Very boring.)
In short, LIV Golf is a disruptive force. It’s Uber for the PGA Tour’s fleet of aging cabs with canny drivers and broken springs.
From the outrage in the media, you’d think LIV Golf took a swing at the PGA Tour and called their baby ugly. But here’s the real reason everyone claims to be so upset with LIV Golf: the money comes (shhhh! not that high!) from the Saudis.
OK, let’s all take a deep breath here. According to a recent ESPN report, the NBA and its owners doing more than $10 billion worth of business with China, which itself is not a bastion of civil rights, but nobody says boo about that. When Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey tweeted about Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong protests, China removed NBA preseason games from television and canceled NBA Cares events in Shanghai. Leading civil liberties experts from LeBron James on down did the same thing: They kept their mouths shut. So it’s not like the sports world really cares about human rights.
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The PGA Tour is not the right organization to complain about indecency. In living memory, blacks could not compete in PGA Tour events, and could not belong to or compete at Augusta National, the revered home of the Masters. The 1990 PGA Championship was scheduled for Shoal Creek, a private golf course in Alabama that had always staunchly and publicly resisted black members. And more than a handful of PGA Tour sponsors do business with…wait for it… Saudi Arabia, which has been a force in golf for the past five years. So it’s good to see the PGA Tour finally developing an interest in human rights.
The sports media, deep in the pocket of the PGA Tour, cannot hide their contempt for the golfers who made the jump to LIV Golf. At Wednesday’s pre-pro-am press conference (with former President Donald Trump, who owns the course), the questions were mostly sarcastic: How do you feel about leaving your Ryder Cup team for a team called The Crusher? Well, I could ask a question about golf, since these are golfers, but that would be too boring.
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The liberal media calls this new golf entity “sportswashing,” I call their protests brainwashing. That’s because, from a fan’s perspective, LIV Golf is a much better experience. Gone is the sense of heavy self-sufficiency that marks PGA Tour events. LIV Golf is so new that there is a feeling of freshness, fun and making things up as you go. The vast majority of LIV golfers are the cream of the golf crop (no shaky Q School survivors here) and when you hang out with them, like I did on pro-am day, they exude a Liberty sensation.
Yes, they are paid well, but so are all the elite athletes. And you can feel that the team concept, despite the sarcastic questions from the media, is something they enjoy. One of the players noted approvingly that it was like being on a college golf team all over again. If the golfers have fun, the product will be much better, for them and for the fans. It’s a new day in professional golf, perhaps the first of its kind since old Tom Morris first pitched it at St. Andrews more than 150 years ago.
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