I will anxiously await to see this plan. I am more inclined to believe columns like these will pan out.
My kid went to a couple local tournaments with his buddies, they got very cheap tickets and said it was fun but wouldn’t actually pay to see it.
A buddy of mine went to a couple.
I compare it to the IRL and CART split in the 90’s.
The players haven’t fared too well to date. And without eager sponsors, no one will want to play on this thing.
Apparently the Saudis didn’t realize that creating a professional golf league from nothing was a difficult thing to do. Especially when competing with the PGA for eyeballs/clicks/ad revenue.
I ran across this article which makes a great point:
Thomas Friedman, one of the world’s authorities on the Middle East, can go just as deep on golf. We asked him to explain LIV
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/thomas-friedman--one-of-the-world-s-authorities-on-the-middle-ea
How would you characterize the Saudis’ original goal for LIV Golf and how it fit into the larger PIF strategy?
Friedman: I had a brief conversation with a very senior Saudi leader at the time. He was under the impression that it would increase the play of golf in Saudi Arabia, which was part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s larger strategy of attracting tourists, particularly sports tourism, to Saudi Arabia. MBS himself was not a golfer, although his brother Khalid, the defense minister, is. I explained to them that the way to attract golf to Saudi Arabia was not by funding a rival tour to the PGA Tour, made up largely by professional golfers on the back nine of their careers, but instead by dedicating 20 miles of Saudi Arabia’s massive coastline and inviting the world’s top five golf architects to build five links courses there. That is what would bring golf tourists—not this LIV tour.
By the way, great link to the article about what will happen to those LIV players.
It’s kind of hard to understand how they did not foresee the damage to their reputations with this, as well as the eventual crumbling of LIV.
I can’t say that I predicted any of this, but I am also not deeply entrenched into the world of professional golf like they are.
I figure that either these guys had such raging boners for the money that they couldn’t think straight, or their inner circle of knowledgeable advisers let them down big time.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they were warned by competent friends about the dangers here, and simply disregarded these warnings, believing they knew better.
Regarding the second point, going on memory everybody who wrote about the subject said that the Saudis were in it for the long haul and that was pretty much a given that LIV was not going to be making money for a while. The news about them cutting funding was pretty sudden and unexpected.
As for their reputations, I remember this column from three years ago contrasting Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson:
It makes one great point:
The golfers who left the PGA Tour for LIV fall into four categories: fading players, minor figures, current stars, and Phil Mickelson. He was the only one who could have transitioned to a lucrative career as entertainer, elder statesman and broadcaster and chose a much darker path instead.
For the fading players and minor figures, they probably figured that the upside of taking the money far outweighed any down-side. The fading players were well past their primes when they could win a lot on the PGA, and the minor players were never going to get there. I can understand how somebody in either of those positions would jump at the opportunity to get a king-sized payday just to play tag-team fifty-four hole golf.
As for the stars and Michelson, I agree with you. I also suspect that they thought a lot of themselves and their individual golfing abilities to the point that they thought that it was not possible that going to a gimmicky second-hand league could possibly negatively affect them. Hell, I bet they had visions of them taking LIV to unseen hights and the PGA crying that they left it behind.
Also, I mentioned before that when Jon Rahm jumped ship it looked like LIV and the PGA merger talks would be successful. Rahm figured he would jump to LIV, pocket his $300 million and then shortly go back to playing the same PGA courses that he always liked. Too bad for him it didn’t turn out that way.
LIV actually was good for PGA players in that the PGA tournament purses rose considerably after LIV started. Before LIV started I was a big Dustin Johnson fan and was disappointed when he signed up. And what’s with the team format? Greg Norman was an early founder, I don’t know if he’s still involved anymore. One more comment: Mickelson has a gambling problem and I think he went to LIV to help pay his debts.
I’ve never spent time in Saudi but wouldn’t it be to hot to play golf there? Even here in Oregon where the climate is mild, people go early to be out of the heat
I played a round in Mexico in July.
I was swamp ass by the third hole.
Saudi may not have the humidity as Mexico, so it may not be as bad.
I know they have a few tournaments over there every year.
Very interesting. I don’t read the media aggressively, but I feel like he’s a bit of a media darling and maybe this gets glossed over.
Hard to feature people making so much money wanting to piss it away like that. I guess something inside them wants the thrill of the risky situation.
Michael Jordan comes to mind as another example. Guy made all the money in the world, even back in the 90s, and still seemed to have a gambling addiction.
He is no longer involved, and his exit was pretty much unceremoneous.
Update: This is funny:
It sounds like DeChambeau is planning his exit.
Maybe I just have a simpleton’s mind, but why would he do this silly charade instead of just leaving?
Perhaps he thinks there’s a tiny chance they’d grant him that compensation, so might as well ask?
I think it’s funny that he’s a YouTuber as a professional golfer. More power to him. That’s probably a great way to harness his big personality financially.
It is making him a ton of money, but IMO, it is hurting his competitiveness.
That is even more true for Jon Rahm on both points.
He’s a YouTuber as well?
Not that I know of. However, he was paid $300 million to jump ship to LIV and he has performed worse than DeChambeau since.
Speaking of golf, played Saturday and Sunday this weekend.
Couldn’t buy a fairway Saturday, Sunday went 18 holes without losing a ball. Hit 8 out of 12 fairways.
And, the saga continues.
Edit: More gloating.
The first step in navigating a FAFO situation is to acknowledge that you did, in fact, FA. That’s a difficult reconciliation for LIV golfers, conditioned as they are to present their actions as ‘grow the game’ altruism or something that everyone would’ve done in their position, despite overwhelming evidence that neither is true. But even the most obtuse among them must now realize that they’ve reached the point of FO.
…
Even if they aren’t yet reconciled to it in these early days of the unraveling, the reality for many LIV players is that Mickelson and Greg Norman convinced them they’d be saddling up on a thoroughbred, but instead they find themselves strapped to a knackered nag on a one-way trip to the glue factory.