The Whiny LIV Players Just Need To Stop
It's embarassing, and it's not doing anyone any good.
It’s a strange time in golf when the headlines that the PGA had suspended Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Abraham Ancer, Pat Perez and others … wasn’t really a headline, in and of itself?
That’s at least sort of because it’s just a technical formality, and the news that these guys were joining LIV broke awhile ago. But … that’s the weird part, to me. The PGA Tour is legitimately fractured right now, and I find it pretty interesting who has taken each side. Since it’s a smaller group, just look at the prominent names who are on the LIV Golf Tour:
Dustin Johnson, Koepka, DeChambeau, Phil Mickelson, Ancer, Perez, Louis Oosthuizen, Talor Gooch, Kevin Na, Patrick Reed, Matthew Wolff, Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia, Graeme McDowell, Lee Westwood, Charl Schwartzel, Carlos Ortiz, Martin Kaymer, Branden Grace, Hudson Swafford, Berndt Wiesberger.
It’s easy to make fun of LIV, and I’m here for it, but that’s about 20 guys you could expect to be in any given PGA Tournament from week to week. In fairness, at least five or six of them you could expect to contend in those tournaments. There are still rumors that guys like Patrick Cantlay, Rickie Fowler, Bubba Watson, Jason Kokrak and others are at least seriously considering it.
I am not really a fan of Phil, Brooks or Bryson, but at least they answered the questions by saying things like “it was a decision I’m comfortable making” without a lot of fake public relations crap or window dressing. Both of those guys have recent wins at a major, which qualifies them for many more of those, especially if LIV starts earning OWGR points in a year or two. And maybe they’ve both decided that generational wealth trumps any future chances to win a major - and whatever. They’ve basically acknowledged what is obvious, and I have to appreciate that absolutely minimal amount of candor and transparency.
Guys like Pat Perez, who has never really competed in a major, after mocking the very idea of LIV, not only wore a shirt with a print of money on it, but then had the gall to blame the PGA for forcing too many starts (he played in 19 events last year, LIV will have 18 events a year), and criticized PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan.
Perez has won three times, never lost his card, and earned over $28,000,000 on tour in his career. He’s a very good golfer and he should be proud of that fact. He’s had a single top-10 in a major in that career, and that was 17 years ago. This all didn’t go over so well with the PGA establishment, like Freddie Couples:
“I heard of all people Perez was a little confrontational,” Couples said of the press conference ahead of Perez’s LIV debut this week in Oregon. “He’s a grain of sand in this Tour. He should be soft and kind, but he’s, like, raising his voice. I’m done with it.”
Like Perez, there are other guys that need to check themselves. Talor Gooch tweeted this after the PGA announced some of their recent restructuring:
No, Talor. Don’t do that. You didn’t do this to improve the way the PGA Tour is run, you did it for the money. Just say so and enjoy your life.
Players on the DP World Tour (formerly the Euro Tour) have threatened legal action if they can’t compete in those events such as the upcoming Scottish Open. This almost certainly includes guys like Poulter, Westwood, McDowell and probably Garcia, among others.
Keith Pelley, the tour commissioner, isn’t having it.
“One player in particular named in the note has only played six Rolex Series events in the past five years. Another one, only four.
“I wish many of them had been as keen to play on our Tour then as they seem to be now, based on the fact they have either resigned their membership of the PGA Tour or, if they are still in membership, have been suspended indefinitely.
“Furthermore, given how deeply these players say they care about the DP World Tour, perhaps some of them could have played in Ireland this week in support of our new title sponsor, in particular one player who gave us a signed commitment to play at Mount Juliet.
“With that player currently in action at Pumpkin Ridge, you can imagine the allegation in the letter that we are in the wrong, is hard to accept.”
That is NOT a subtle, workshopped through three levels of PR, memo. That’s a hammer.
So look … I know it’s early in the LIV Tour’s existence. You really should have thought this out already, but … feigning shock and dismay that exactly what you should have expected to happen, has happened. Phil Mickelson’s biggest sin from the PGA Tour’s standpoint was not anything he said, it’s the fact he worked with the Saudis and hired lawyers to write the bylaws of a league constructed to challenge the PGA.
That just IS what it is. Pretending otherwise is so embarassing. Don’t be those guys.
There’s time to work this out. And what you need to work out is a way for players to say, simply:
I understand that I might not be able to play on the PGA or Euro Tour anymore, and I factored that in my decision;
The money I was offered was too much to turn down;
I get that I’m working for people you might not think it’s cool to work with, but I’m okay with it. That’s right, I am.
That’s it. It’s not hard.