LIV a Little
Do sports make good disinfectants?
All this week, whispers of war have echoed from Rochester to Riyadh. Frightening times, lemme tell you.
Former allies stand, caddies at the ready, on opposite sides of a lush battlefield. Really, an expertly manicured warfront. Cheers to whoever’s keeping these greens.
But alright, back to the war. The civil war, despite upstate New York being a solid 6,500 miles from the Persian Gulf. Because this isn’t about the world world, although it also is.
This is about the world of golf, and even if you don’t care about golf, you’ve likely heard word from the front: we are a country club at war. Down in the bunkers — dual-purpose these days — sponsored polos are smudged with Aramco crude.
This war has two sides — PGA vs. LIV — which, depending who you ask, also translates to:
Principle vs. Excess
Moral Absolutism vs. Relativism
Tradition vs. Disruption
And above all:
Clean vs. Dirty
The broad strokes (don’t) are pretty simple.
The PGA Tour has been around for close to a century now, and it runs the preeminent pro golf circuit, mainly in the United States.
The LIV Tour debuted less than a year ago, poaching a few of the world’s top golfers in open rebellion against the PGA Tour. It’s done it by throwing staggering amounts of money at those players, effectively daring them to say no to generational wealth.
And how might they be affording that? LIV is financed by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia, part of a fairly transparent “sportswashing” campaign: an effort to launder the kingdom’s human rights record by establishing a presence in sports.
Scrub-a-Dub-Dub
Last weekend, Brooks Koepka won the PGA Championship, one of the sport’s four major tournaments. They are the competitions by which golf greatness is measured. It takes the best to win them.
In a typical year, someone like Koepka winning a major would be unremarkable. It’s his third PGA, and his fifth major. His career had taken a swoon of late, so there’s a comeback story in here as well, but he was the best in the world all too recently.
Which is all to say: normally, this would all be normal.
This year, it is not. Because Koepka is one of the many top-flight golfers to join the LIV Tour, bringing the team back in the Gulf its first major.
While this was inevitably going to happen at some point — Koepka and others have been mighty close before — now that it has, the equally inevitable “what does this mean?” questions are following.
First, it means an obvious boost for LIV. What had been derided as a gimmicky format that couldn’t produce winners on the biggest stages looks to be a weaker argument today. Maybe you don’t need to play on the PGA Tour to win majors, which was a dumb hill to plant a flag on anyhow.
Second, as with anyone looking to please their investors, it helps to have results to point to. As LIV chief Greg Norman — a former golf great, as well as a man so famously prickly that he’s down to Donald Trump for PR defense — asks Riyadh for more riyals, he’ll now be able to make a stronger case that the kingdom’s sizable stake in the tour hasn’t been for naught.
That could be important as the future of LIV is decided in the years to follow. After all, golf is not the sum total of Saudi Arabia’s sportfolio. Some wonder if the kingdom’s commitment to LIV will fade if ventures in soccer, F1 racing, and boxing prove to be better bets.
They’ve certainly paid a lot upfront — somewhere on the order of $2 billion, all in — and that’s only counting those who took the money. LIV reportedly offered Tiger Woods alone about a third of that, only to be spurned.
Forget the Brink’s truck. They’re backing up convoys.
And while a day may come when they expect some monetary return on that investment, for the time being, they’re probably not concerned with LIV’s ratings, which have been disappointing enough to stop publicizing them.
For the Saudis, even the worst-case losses amount to rounding errors. They’re after something else.
Teeing Off
So, why golf?
For starters, there isn’t some hulking league or union standing in the way. The PGA Tour has long considered its golfers to be independent contractors, and on top of that, it doesn’t even run the major championships.
For my fellow casuals, let me proclaim here and now how funny this is: the PGA Tour does not put on the PGA Championship. Yeah, you’re looking for the PGA of America. Try and keep up, dummy.
Albeit less comically, the PGA Tour doesn’t control the other three majors either: the British Open, the U.S. Open, or the Masters.
Those are all separate events, over which the PGA Tour has limited leverage. While there are some complex rules around qualifying for those tournaments that could continue to come into play down the line, thus far, no major has banned LIV golfers.
The PGA Tour has banned them from their events, but let’s be real: the four tournaments above are the majors, and the rest are the minors.
Did you read about how Mackenzie Hughes narrowly edged out Sepp Straka and Garrick Higgo to win the Sanderson Farms Championship in Jackson, Mississippi back at the start of the season? No? Cool. Me either.
In short, there was a lane for a challenge, and if it hadn’t come laced with Saudi money, there might have been a better shot to compete on the merits rather than on the ethics.
Norman’s been at this for ages. Say what you want, but the dude can hold a grudge nearly as well as he sells casual apparel to my dad at Costco.
My guess is the PGA Tour would have reacted the same way no matter the source. The organization’s moves to penalize LIV defectors strike me as having less to do with human rights than keeping its hold on the sport. Some of the sanctimony rings a tad hollow.
Even still, it’s not like it’s unfounded.
Pronouncements like these, from Norman last year, summarize the perspective the Saudi regime would like to see the world adopt:
“This whole thing about Saudi Arabia and Khashoggi and human rights; talk about it, but also talk about the good that the country is doing in changing its culture… Look, we’ve all made mistakes and you just want to learn by those mistakes and how you can correct them going forward.”
Yikes.
When grisly state-sanctioned murders become “mistakes,” we’re in the drink.
Birdie or Bogey?
I’m not sure what will happen with LIV. There’s reason to think it will indeed fade if it fails to find a bigger audience, or the Saudis just lose interest. Some credit the whole saga with forcing the PGA Tour to better itself. Maybe that’s the LIV legacy in the end.
But there are also reasons to think the Saudis might take a longer view and back it regardless, in which case the PGA Tour, and pro golf in general, will need to learn how to live (don’t) with it. Talk of détente is already out there, if not universally embraced.
Whether it’s here for a good time or a long time, will it deliver the Saudis the sporting scouring that they set out to achieve?
It’s hard to say. Russia hasn’t expanded its cultural cachet following the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, though there’s a pretty obvious reason for that.
China may not have massively burnished its reputation with last year’s games in Beijing, but between that and its longstanding ties to the NBA — to say nothing of other American cultural institutions — the CCP has made sports a key part of its economic diplomacy.
Qatar, too, seems to have gotten what it wanted out of a controversial World Cup.
As for Saudi Arabia, it’s so far, so good. They’ve firmly implanted themselves in the game, with plans to turn the country into a golf destination as part of a larger tourism push. They want to be a place the world will do business with, and they’re well on their way.
I don’t take any of this to be a good thing, but it’s a real thing, and much as we look to sports for escape, moral quandaries — including those of the geopolitical persuasion — will always be a part of them. We accept that when we tune in.
It’s everyone’s choice what they accept and what they don’t. I don’t think there’s blood on your hands if you secretly pulled for Koepka last weekend, or watched the World Cup, or an NBA game, or pretty much any game of football, any more than I think you’re some kind of snowflake if you choose not to.
All I ask is we not be naive about it. The point system’s broken, and we can acknowledge that as we go about our complicated lives.
Just keep your head out of the sand. That’s a hazard, you know.