More Weekly Read: New-look Pebble Beach | Niemann’s 59 in perspective
PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico — There is an anecdotal sense that those who follow the game simply want to get back to the golf. They’ve grown weary of the money talk, the private equity talk, the PIF talk.
They want to watch the best players compete more often together and would prefer the acrimony between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf League go away, somehow.
Good luck.
As this past week proved once again, the happenings outside the ropes continue to dominate the sport. The PGA Tour’s announcement that it has made a deal with the Strategic Sports Group that will invest some $3 billion in the new PGA Tour Enterprises is understandably a big deal.
It helps the Tour solve some of the financial issues it has faced in the wake of LIV Golf’s emergence, although none of the SSG money will be invested in the non-profit PGA Tour Inc., which still is the vehicle for events such as the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and this week’s WM Phoenix Open.
What it will do is enrich the players as up to 200 will receive some sort of equity stake in the new company based on numerous factors including past, present and future performance.
What that means and how it will be determined remains a mystery, as will how the new company can bring back enormous revenue to help satisfy its private equity partners.
And how the Public Investment Fund might be included—or not—has now become a bigger question.
The PGA Tour can take the view that it doesn’t need such investment. That it can prosper without the PIF. That it can achieve its goals of rewarding players and coming up with new formats on its own.
Of course, that risks the obvious: that the PIF would continue to fund LIV Golf, poach players that would have no access to PGA Tour events, and divide the game even further.
As it stands, three of the last five major champions play for LIV Golf. That might not get you to watch it and there are plenty of excellent players competing on the PGA Tour. But it does remain the big elephant in the room.
Many golf fans will have watched Pebble Beach over the last few days and will tune in to Phoenix this week and Genesis the next. The West Coast Swing is some of the best golf of the year. But are those events better without Jon Rahm, without Brooks Koepka? They’re still great tournaments, but the golf fan is denied two of the game’s most decorated players, both of whom won major championships last year.
To be clear, the PIF faces risk here without joining forces with the PGA Tour. That acceptance is huge in terms of the overall goals of having a seat at the table. While the PIF might love LIV, its stated goals all along suggested more than just running an outlier golf tour. And that’s what it will be if a divide remains.
LIV needs clear TV windows. While LIV got a break Sunday that the final round at Pebble Beach was postponed (Joaquin Niemann prevailed in a four-hole sudden-death playoff over Sergio Garcia), it in no way helps to be going up against an iconic PGA Tour event, with one of its best fields. This week LIV heads to Las Vegas and although it will end on Saturday, it still goes head-to-head with another popular tournament.
And acceptance is needed in other ways. Big sponsors have been reluctant to support LIV. It has slowly evolved as LIV teams have been tasked with getting their own deals as part of the LIV business plan, but at some point in time, the PIF could grow weary of $25 million purses and millions more spent on television production and an immense build-out of the product at tournament venues.
All of that is covered via the PGA Tour’s television rights deals and sponsorship agreements.
Then there is the issue of Official World Golf Ranking points, the best entry point to the major championships. Wouldn’t there be more incentive to work out that thorny issue if everyone is on the same side?
Perhaps those problems become workable for LIV if its benefactor, the PIF, is part of the PGA Tour Enterprises.
So far, the feelings on that are mixed, if you listen to Jordan Spieth and Rory McIlroy, who spoke about it at Pebble Beach. There is no indication how that might go.
Meanwhile, golf fans wonder what “unification” would even look like if there is no agreement. Do the best of the best only continue to play in major championships? Does the Ryder Cup continue to shut out LIV golfers because they are not part of the PGA Tour nor DP World Tour? Is there some sort of competitive model that brings them all together in some sort of separate “world” series of events, akin to the Champions League in European football?
How would a player even qualify for it?
“At the end of the day if you play well and I continue to go on the path that I want to see myself at, you’re going to be playing the best tournaments, you’re going to be at all these tournaments and you don’t worry about any of that stuff,” said two-time major winner Collin Morikawa. “I think there’s so much talk of seeing the best players in the world play against each other, and at the end of the day that’s where you want to be, you want to be playing against the best as much as you can and see how that kind of plays out.”
