LIV Golf is incredibly stupid. And it might kill the PGA Tour.
The PGA Tour seems ill prepared for a very real threat.
I’ve talked in this space about LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed renegade golf league that has used its seemingly unlimited budget to woo golfers away from the PGA Tour. While many of the initial names were guys that most folks haven’t heard of, the initial list did include Dustin Johnson, Louis Oosthuizen, Lee Westwood, Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia, Kevin Na and Talor Gooch, among others. Since then, Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed have indicated they’re playing in events and even Rickie Fowler is still openly considering it.
Are those the best PGA golfers? No. But with Johnson and Oosthuizen, there are two top-25 golfers, and many of the rest of these guys have name brand recognition. They are playing in teams, similar to Formula 1, and hoo boy are the team names childish. They sound and look like they were created in a video game that didn’t have licensing rights to “real” team names.
Even worse, the LIV Tour seems to have - quite unnecessarily - released WHY the teams are named what they are. YIKES.
But none of that really matters. What matters, as always, is the money. For some reason, the golfers aren’t really comfortable saying this out loud (though they have certainly alluded to it). But despite the myriad of problems the PGA has, DJ resigned from it because LIV offered him a minimum of $125,000,000 to simply join. Mickelson reportedly got $200,000,000. (It’s worth noting Tiger Woods was offered even more and turned it down.)
Here’s the actual prize money:
To be very clear, $4,000,000 is more than any first place prize for a regular season event, including THE PLAYERS which is the biggest payout ($3.6MM) by a landslide. And each player on the winning team will split an additional $3MM, meaning the winner is likely to walk away with $4.75MM. Rory McIlroy had a pretty good 2021 season and earned less than that on course for the entire year, and was still 20th in earnings.
The money is LEGIT, and it’s going to matter.
And yet, we keep hearing about growing the game, being innovators, getting in on the ground floor of something new and transforming professional sports.
But it’s about the money.
And here’s the thing - this weekend, the guy who finishes dead last will earn at least $120,000.00. Last weekend at The Memorial, you had to finish within the top-20 (of roughly 150 players).
The money is going to matter, and it’s going to matter starting THIS SUNDAY. What happens when someone named Laurie Canter or Blake Windred walks away with millions of dollars from a single event? (Forget the massive - for each of them, a relative amount, but an important one - payouts they each got for simply signing with LIV.) Guys who are on the fence will suddenly get off said fence.
What’s also really troubling is that … the PGA Tour product, which already has difficulty, is now going to get markedly worse. It’s not JUST losing the above names from their events … it’s that they have replace these guys. Players like John Huston, J.J. Henry and people named Brad Adamonis and George McNeill are now playing in the RBC Canadian Open. These are nice opportunities for these guys of course, but they shouldn’t be in the field of the “best” players in golf.
So now we have a group of 48 golfers in LIV who are playing a new brand of golf we can’t really see anywhere except YouTube, and a PGA Tour event that is worse than it could be because of these defectors.
As Andy points out in a subsequent tweet, Huston is worse than any player on the LIV Tour.
In a perfect world, the PGA Tour understands that this is a true threat and responds by making its product better and more lucrative for the best golfers on tour.
This is far from a perfect world, and I have my doubts.