Nouveau-richer PGA Tour stars should tip a cap to LIV
The Saudi-backed tour enters its second season Friday in Mexico.
Kenny Perry got into two playoffs at major championships and won neither. He also played exceptional golf throughout the late 90s and early oughts and won 14 PGA Tour events and over $32 million.
He knew he didn’t build that castle alone.
“Every time I see Tiger Woods I ask him if I can carry his clubs to his car,” Perry once said. “I know what he’s done for us.”
Cut to this year’s PGA Tour, where money is growing like fescue. Suddenly there are 17 “elevated” tournaments, including the majors and the FedEX Cup playoff events, all with $20 million purses, with The Players Championship offering $25 million.
Scottie Scheffler won in Phoenix and Jon Rahm won in Los Angeles. The winner’s haul in each case was $3.6 million, as opposed to the $1.44 million Rahm won in La Quinta, at a “flattened” event once known as the Bob Hope Desert Classic.
In L.A., Patrick Cantlay finished third and earned $1.38 million. In Phoenix, Justin Rose finished 18th and won $128,325.
A significant reason this is happening is spelled LIV.
The Saudi-backed LIV Tour has multiple faults, including poor planning and a scarcity of drama. The PGA Tour has treated Greg Norman’s venture, which enters its second year Friday at the Mayakoba resort in Mexico, like something rancid that it just stepped in.
Yet it also responded to LIV by hurriedly buffing up its own purses, to keep its best players from wondering if the cash is really greener on the other side. Maybe this would have happened anyway, since the PGA Tour signed an eight-year deal with its TV partners that could yield $700 million per year through 2030. We’ll never know exactly how much of that would have trickled down to the players, who have been chronically underpaid in comparison to other top-notch atheltes. But we can assume the presence of LIV sped along the process.
Last year LIV had an eight-tournament debut that was basically played by word of mouth. There was no conventional TV, and even the scores were difficult to find, since the Golf Channel, ESPN and other PGA Tour partners ignored them. More pointedly, the Official World Golf Rankings refused to award points to LIV contestants.
Still, Dustin Johnson took home $35.6 million. Peter Uihlein, a former top-ranked amateur, was third on the LIV list with $12.8 million. Uihlein, 33, turned pro in 2006 and has won a total of $4 million on the PGA Tour, moving no needles. He wasn’t playing for the money anyway, since his dad Wally was the CEO of Acushnet, the parent company of Titleist. But he obviously made the right call. He wasn’t on track to stay on the PGA Tour, but on LIV, you don’t have to play well to get rich, thanks to a 4-man team format that Norman swears will become embedded in every fan’s mind.
Perhaps Eugenio Chicarra will become known as well. As of now, he is a 22-year-old from Spain who left Oklahoma State to sign up with LIV because “the PGA Tour doesn’t secure me anything.” The LIV Tour secured him $6.9 million last year.
On the 2022 PGA Tour, Scheffler was the leading money man with $14 million, and Cam Smith was second with $10.1 million. Smith won the Open Championship with a Sunday 64, then bolted for LIV. He is probably the only truly ascending player who has done so, but Mito Pereira, the Chilean who had the PGA Championship lead on the 72nd tee last year, has followed. There’s been a drip-drip-drip of defecting talent, and now the LIV crowd will be able to play in all four major championships this year, which reduces the need for “elevation” on the LIV Tour. Johnson, Sergio Garcia, Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson, Patrick Reed and Charl Schwartzel have combined for nine Masters titles, and the friction will be tangible if one of those LIV stalwarts finds himself head-to-head with PGA Tour evangelist McIlroy in Amen Corner on Sunday.
Johnson might not be Larry Summers or Paul Krugman, but he summed up the economic incentives fairly well. He said that if you have a chance to make more money by doing less work, you not only should do it, you probably should reassess your cognitive powers if you don’t do it. (He didn’t actually say “cognitive.”)
The toughest part about the LIV Tour, like PGA Tour Champions, is joining up. Norman, and his Saudi blood-money overlords, are considering bigger fields in the future, but when Thomas Pieters and six others were invited into the 48-man fold, seven others were let go.
There is no cut and only three rounds. Pieters, from Belgium, says the 14-event schedule allows him to quit continent-hopping and spend time with family. LIV provides transporting and lodging for caddies and agents, too, which increases the pressure on PGA Tour players to bolt. As an anonymous caddie wrote in Golf Digest, there is always a LIV official or two on the practice range, ready to address complaints or needs. He said he’d been on the PGA Tour for a lot of years and was approached twice by officials, both of whom were seeking tickets for other sporting events.
But in the tightening TV sports atmosphere, LIV still hasn’t found the best marketplace. This year its events will be on the CW network, which will make you scramble to find that channel list that’s buried on your coffee table. The Friday rounds will only be accessible through the CW app, and the weekend rounds will be shown on tape-delay when they’re played in foreign time zones. LIV finally got a sponsor this week, EasyPost, a “logistics and commerce” company that already sponsors Reed.
Johnson’s 15-year association with Adidas came to an end this week, so that Johnson could put the logo of his LIV team, known as the 4Aces, on his shirt instead. Watson claims that his young son knows all the team rosters and predicts other kids will do the same. We shall see.
It is shameful for a sports organization to lie in the same flea-ridden bed as the Saudi government, but it’s harder to maintain that outrage when President Biden is fist-bumping Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
LIV proponents sometimes liken their venture to the American Football League in the early 1960s. The “Foolish Club,” the eight owners who launched that venture, eventually placed all its franchises into the NFL by raiding NFL rosters, or threatening to, and signing top college players. Some sports could use a shakeup like this, particularly baseball. What will happen when the next charismatic amateur is confronted with this fork in the road?
McIroy and Reed can trade insults, and Garcia can cite McIlroy’s lack of maturity, which is like George Santos calling someone a liar. It exposes a vein of animosity and pettiness that the PGA Tour has desperately tried to conceal.
But when those checks are wired into the accounts of the top players in the world, they should create a quality of mercy that is not strained. Maybe McIlroy and his boys won’t actually lift a LIV bag, but you would expect them to pop a trunk lid, at least.