Brooksie, LIV and the Future of Golf
Cue the dramatic headline!
As readers of this space no doubt already know, I’m not a fan of LIV Golf and what it represents, who it is funded by, and in general most of the golfers who have chosen to join up. In general, most of the golfers were older, washed and malcontents. Over the last year, it seemed like the only true golfers who were still truly competitive were Dustin Johnson and Cameron Smith. With DJ, he’s one of the very best golfers of the post-Tiger era, and had notched his second major title in 2020 with a win at the Masters. But he still always has a chance to win even if he seems like he’s fading a notch. And Cam Smith joined immediately after winning The Open during a year where he was clearly one of, if not the very best golfer on the planet.
And then, there’s Brooks Koepka. Koepka has always come across as a bit of a Cobra Kai bully, someone who has absolutely zero time for folks who annoy him, etc.
And he’s also been an absolute killer on the golf course. Prior to joining LIV, he had four majors (two U.S. Opens, two PGA Championships) … and also seemed perhaps broken beyond repair.
His appearance on the Netflix documentary Full Swing confirmed that he wasn’t sure if he still had it, that he watched guys like Scottie Scheffler dominate and know his body and mind wasn’t competitive. In his press conference yesterday, he mentioned how bad his injury had been and what he’d gone through, and I certainly appreciate that he did the work to get back.
Brooks is a tremendous golfer and is now in rarified air with five majors. He’s contended at almost every major he’s played. This Wikipedia chart is … impressive as hell.
2022 was, it seems, a serious outlier we can now chalk up to his injuries. Koepka is a legit menace and deserves ALL the praise and plaudits he is receiving.
But again, Koepka is not a member of the PGA Tour. He’s now the darling of the LIV Tour (“Golf, but LOUDER!”) and it’s interesting to see what this means for LIV. Bryson DeChambeau, another villain on the LIV tour who shockingly performed very well at this major (after being almost invisible for three years since his own major win at the 2020 U.S. Open), thinks it’s massive:
"It validates everything we've said from the beginning: That we're competing at the highest level and we have the ability to win major championships.
"I really hope people can see the light now that we're trying to provide the game of golf with something new and fresh. I think at the end of the day, both sides are going to have to come together at some point. It's for the good of the game."
Like most things Bryson says, this is not remotely an accurate representation of history.
Nobody has argued that LIV didn’t have good golfers - they are but a smaller representation of the overall field, but there are plenty of major champions there, including DeChambeau. While many have (justifiably?) portrayed the league as mostly being comprised of guys past their prime, I would argue that not only is it not crazy that a LIV golfer won a major, but that it was absolutely critical for the health of the fledgling league. Because LIV has been stating all along that they have some of the very best golfers in the world, and that the rest of the golfing world is biased against them and colluding, etc.
So, if you have some of the very best golfers in the world, they SHOULD be competing at majors. Personally, I didn’t see this coming - and publicly said I didn’t think they were getting the reps. And while the only two LIV golfers who were really threatening to win this week were Brooks and Bryson, others ended up on the correct side of the leaderboard. Cam Smith (T9), Patrick Reed and Mito Pereira (T19) were all in the top-20. (Reed is truly shocking to me, but he backed up his performance at The Masters here.) Other LIV golfers like Harold Varner III, Dustin Johnson, Thomas Pieters, Dean Burmeister, Phil Mickleson made the cut, which is more than PGA stalwarts like Matt Fitzpatrick, Rickie Fowler, Tom Kim, Cameron Young and others (as well as LIV ‘studs’ like Talor Gooch and Joaquin Niemann) can say.
So that’s good news for LIV, but it’s hardly a saving grace. Nobody is watching (mostly because they gave up their free streaming service for a CW contract that has almost assuredly reduced their audience, a fact we can assume since LIV has stopped sharing numbers). They are teeing it up this week - at yet another course owned by Donald Trump, which speaks to the corner LIV willingly carved out for itself, and the league has become aggressively political, which immediately turns off a lot of potential viewers (if they can even find it on television.) It’s unlikely that LIV will be able to recruit more golfers if the rumors about the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund losing billions of late and becoming disinterested in this experiment are even remotely true. Greg Norman may continue to show off his frowny face.
How does LIV move forward? Will there be some truce between the leagues?
I think this all comes to a head at the Ryder Cup. Koepka is a mortal lock for the team now based on his two majors performance, and unless LIV golfers are banned, that’s a foregone conclusion. Decisions about Official World Golf Ranking points are still far away from resolution, but what happens from here?
The future remains cloudy, to say the very least.
All of that being said, once again congratulations to Koepka on reaching rarified air. With five majors, he’s now one of only 20 men to do so, tied with names like Seve Ballesteros, Peter Thomson and Byron Nelson. One more major would move him up to just 12 other folks, and two more - which doesn’t seem insane - would tie him with guys like Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer. I think he has a green jacket in his future for sure, and at this point, it’s hard to bet against Brooks. Do so at your own risk.