LIV Golf had a seemingly endless supply of Saudi money that suddenly is coming to an end. Overlooked is another of its assets — this one with no price tag — the PGA Tour would love to have.
A blank canvas.
Even as LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil was trying to present hope for a future without the financial muscle of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the PGA Tour was moving from one signature event to another on the short road to Aronimink for the PGA Championship.
It’s a schedule that doesn’t make sense.
From the first major at the Masters through the second major at the PGA Championship, the top players face three $20 million signature events and two majors over six weeks. That followed another brutal stretch of three $20 million events and The Players Championship over five weeks on both sides of the country.
What’s the solution? The Future Competition Committee is working on it, and no doubt has found it difficult to blow up and rebuild a model in place for 100 years with tweaks along the way.
The idea was to get the best players competing against each other more often, and not many would be opposed to a concept like that. It was four years ago when 23 players met privately in Delaware to rally around the tour and against LIV Golf (three of them later defected to LIV).
From that emerged a 2023 schedule where the top players committed to a 20-event schedule in which they would compete against each other at least 17 times. Rory McIlroy skipped two of them.
And McIlroy already has missed two signature events this year after winning another Masters. Four other players from the top 15 in the world didn’t enter the Cadillac Championship last week at Doral. World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler isn’t playing this week at Quail Hollow because he faces as many as four in a row — two of them home events in the Dallas area — starting with the PGA Championship.
Brian Rolapp, the PGA Tour CEO who appointed Tiger Woods to lead the competition committee, was aware of this crunch when it was announced last August.
“How do you actually drive a competitive schedule where every event matters, that is connected to a postseason, but do it in a way where the best golfers can get together and actually perform well?” Rolapp said at the Tour Championship. “I think that’s all an open question, and those are the things we’re going to look at with an open mind.”
But it’s not an open-and-shut case, not with so much history behind the PGA Tour. History is one of sport’s greatest assets until it becomes a hurdle when trying to effectively start over.
Rolapp shed some light on the committee’s progress in March when he mentioned two tracks — one for the elite playing the big-money events on notable golf courses, the other a proving ground of other tournaments on the schedule.
The trick was finding the ladder to get from one to the other. But it still doesn’t solve the crunch that players are facing and when to play them.
The simple part for the tour was sinking two events in Hawaii. Wisconsin-based Sentry, the title sponsor at Kapalua, would seem to be the right fit for Torrey Pines. That gives the West Coast Torrey Pines, Pebble Beach and Riviera, with the “Greatest Show on Grass” (Phoenix) in the mix.
Florida now has five tournaments. March has four weeks.
And perhaps the biggest question to which there are more opinions than answers: What’s the right amount of tournaments? How often should all the best be on the same golf course?
“Part of me wonders how much of an appetite there is for 20 major tournaments,” Matt Kuchar said late last year, after having spent a few hours with Rolapp trying to see the vision.
That led to another question.
“I still scratch my head at what happened to the World Golf Championships,” Kuchar said. “They had a great field — certainly had some obscure names, but for the most part the top 40 or 50 guys in the world played. Tiger won half of them, so clearly they were successful from a TV standpoint.
“Why do we think some other version will work?” he said. “I don’t know.”
The last year for a full slate of WGCs was the year before LIV launched. Sponsorship issues and the COVID-19 pandemic played a big part.
But this is about reinventing the wheel, and there’s sure to be plenty of bumps in the road.
That’s where LIV Golf and its first leader, Greg Norman, could have used a mulligan. The shotgun start and 54-hole competition. The team concept (remember the Niblicks and Punch among the early names?). Golf, but louder — maybe too loud.
LIV had a blank canvas and came up with paint by numbers.
O’Neil is left to create a business plan to take its teams to potential buyers, which probably should have been done long ago when it was flush with cash in a bid to pattern itself after the popular and very global Formula 1 series.
Now the future is in serious doubt. A lot of obits have been written the past few weeks. Media that largely ignored LIV Golf are all over Trump National in Virginia, at least until the competition starts on Thursday.
Norman boasted on the day that LIV announced the field for its first event, “Free agency has finally come to golf.” He might have been ahead of his time. Because if LIV Golf can’t survive without Saudi money, or can’t find enough investors, there will be plenty of free agents.
Meanwhile, Rolapp has a news conference the week after the U.S. Open for an update on the new competition model the PGA Tour is trying to create. There’s a lot of moving parts.
A lot of paint.
___
On The Fringe analyzes the biggest topics in golf during the season. AP golf: https://apnews.com/hub/golf
