The sad consequence of the PGA Tour-PIF negotiations stalemate

I’ve been holding onto this thought for a while, because it sounds rash and emotional and, really, who the hell knows. But here goes: The PGA Tour can’t be as important to the game as it used to be. The best of it came before LIV.

That doesn’t mean pro golf won’t get bigger and richer. It just won’t be as good.

What pushed me to pull the trigger on this idea was reading Shane Ryan’s usually fun and contentious Golfpocalypse column from last week where he put forth tips on handling issues in pro golf. Instead, he said to steer clear of all the emotion and letdown of the present by looking forward to the fun of the mere recreational game. But Shane also said that pro golf can be rather enticing and he cannot quite let it go.

I’m with him but more, for having viewed the geniuses from Vardon to Scheffler in a few more mile posts of life. Skill, talent and performance of golfer has always been the most captivating aspect that was known to me of pro golf.

It’s part institutionalism. I have a lot of love for the PGA Tour for how it has raised its sport just as effectively as the NFL, NBA & MLB have raised their respective mainstream team sports. By careful administration, the PGA Tour has always attracted the world’s best talents to American courses, setting a yardstick that makes it possible to compare different generations of players—though this trajectory is at the risk of being disrupted. Again, the previous modicum of dissatisfaction that players had regarding the PGA Tour prior to the advent of LIV Golf League can largely be summed up like this: Thank you Tiger Woods for bringing about the increase in purse and other things; no more complaining. Well, that’s evident no longer today.

The other thing that’s made PGA Tour so compelling for me is the drama of the tour pro’s quest. The tour’s weekly installments follow characters, rivalries, struggles, triumphs and artistry. Anyone who is good enough to get out there, and then shows devotion, resiliency, guts and grace, I’ve got admiration for and consider sources of inspiration and aspiration. The title of Al Barkow’s seminal history of the tour, Golf’s Golden Grind, got it right.

I stress the weekly tournament trail because it is unique and apart from the major championships, but incredibly important all the same. Of course, the majors are the biggest tournaments in golf and, rather rightfully, the most attention is paid to them. However, just like regular season plays in most other team sports, regular tournaments provided the norms by which performance was judged in pro golf, the broadest way of categorizing players. Mostly their large number provides us with adequate sample likelihood and specific cases to base our assessments and attitudes on. And perhaps most importantly, it helps us remember at certain time what good golf is like.

Of an example of a sport that struggles to have a good ‘normal season’ consider the professional tennis. present there is no cohesively connected pro tennis tour; and, inasmuch as the matches take place nearly every week somewhere in the world and are not accompanied by broad television coverage, it is puzzling for followers of tennis. It emerges clear, and the focus of the sporting disciplines, when the cream of competitition convenes only at the four major championships.

Significantly however, golf’s modern splintering through LIV’s raid on some of the biggest names on the tour has also been behind an elevation in status of the men’s majors relative to the weekly tour events. Despite the fact that defectors to LIV have been locked out of the PGA Tour, they have not been locked out of any of the four majors which therefore remains the only opportunity to get all the best players.

Such an arrangement is bad for pro golf, which makes it bad for golf in general. It has ended the steady upward trajectory in importance that weekly pro golf has enjoyed since the 1950s, and especially since it officially became the PGA Tour in 1968. It’s been a shock to the system, but one that either from depression or denial has caused fans and even players to become apathetic even as the future becomes more fraught.

At the moment, it seems negotiations between the PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia’s PIF and its governor, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, are enmeshed in anti-trust regulation hell, forcing a harrowing holding pattern in which all of golf’s lawyers and all the kingdom’s men can’t seem to put what’s left of the tour back together again. A crucial puzzle piece will involve possible ways, if any, in which LIV players can return to the PGA Tour.

The high stakes and secret negotiations have rendered players and officials basically mute, with the most substantive comment coming from McIlroy when he called the state of pro golf “a s–t show.” It’s estimated a DOJ-vetted resolution is two years away, with history rendering its verdict on accountability well after that. In the meantime, here’s a pent-up but still premature one.

While LIV’s surrogates led by Greg Norman presented its challenge as one of overdue benign disruption, the “irrational threat” of the PIF’s billions has caused blatant destruction.

On the premise that the bigger the name, the deeper the wound, the main culprits have been defectors Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm. The cumulative effect of the trio’s jump, combined with DeChambeau’s dramatic victory at the U.S. Open in June and his popular YouTube channel, has damaged the tour. Putting the moral considerations of taking Saudi money aside, all three undermined the institution that had given them the platform to make history and an albeit smaller fortune.

None of them has shown an ounce of contrition, nor has anyone else who went to LIV. At a 2022 LIV event at Trump Bedminister, I asked Charles Howell III and Paul Casey, two PGA Tour veterans who jumped, if they would feel any responsibility as defectors if the PGA Tour was ruined. Both very calmly and directly said “No.” I’ve always understood when professional golfers say the demands of the game requires them to be selfish. But that selfish? It was chilling.

With all the new money, something has been lost. The former elevated image of pro golfers in the sports world has been knocked down a couple of notches.

Underestimating selfishness and overestimating loyalty was Jay Monahan’s biggest mistake, one understandable for a golf romantic, but not a cold-eyed commissioner. Monahan might have been trying to channel 1994, when at a players’ meeting to discuss the offers Greg Norman was making to star players to jump to a new World League, Arnold Palmer stood up to say that he and Jack Nicklaus had years before received similar offers to start a series of lucrative exhibitions but decided that accepting would have hurt the game and the tour. “Greg, I don’t want any part of this,” he reportedly said and walked out of the room, taking any support for Norman’s proposal with him.

Woods and McIlroy attempted to be as equally sage-like this time around, but no wise man across the galaxy can prevent apostates. Of course, the money was much greater and possibly is the current player’s ego as well or vice versa. In the end, the decision was with the players to bring LIV to a halt and they never did so.

I argue with the opinion that\Libertarianism is based on the premise that every individual has the right to make the best ‘business decision,’ regardless of the cost borne by others. Or that no individual would dare guess how they would behave if given the chance at generational fortune. That being said given the havoc that has ensued and given the way LIV has not integrated itself within the ecosystem of golf to ensure its players receive World Ranking points or be allowed to play on their home tours unfettered, it would have been more prudent for the company to say no.

Every defector who has embraced LIV disrupted the PGA Tour’s hidden ingredient that was thought to have been an honor code higher than any other sport expected of professional golfers, and a fair earning system that remunerated Golf players based on the value they produced rather than assured wages. That people assumed pro golfers did adhere to that code was why corporate America queued to sponsor a PGA Tour event, and otherwise associate with golf.

But now players have jumped to LIV, and even those who didn’t have leveraged the PGA Tour to drastically raise its purses to match LIV money, even though it meant squeezing title sponsors of tournaments whose fields have fewer name stars than they used to. In addition, some 232 players will now split $930 million in equity awards, with Tiger Woods receiving $100 million, from the for-profit PGA Tour Enterprises that has been formed, partly as a payoff for not leaving for LIV.

With all the new money, something has been lost. The former elevated image of pro golfers in the sports world has been knocked down a couple of notches. It’s safe to say that the PGA Tour’s former motto, the double entendre “These guys are good,” which ran from 1997 until 2018, wouldn’t work as well today.

It also means that the current indefinite hold up concerning the tour’s negotiations with the PIF is ill timed. The longer things remain ambiguous, the more a wounded tour may slip rank at the prospect of losing its audience. Worse than being frustrated and angry, exhausted fans could just opt out and tune away. The same thing happened when baseball was struck and the playoffs and the World Series were not played in 1994; fans were angry and went away for more than a year as people stopped going to the stadiums.

The MLB has bounced back, and I wish the PGA Tour will get back to its normal operational status and turn this doomsday call I made here a wrong one. But for that to happen, LIV in its current structure as a stand-alone network will have to cease to exist. Until then, pro golfers can keep playing for more, but it will translate to less.