The PGA Tour Has Responded to LIV Golf, But Until It Lands a TV Deal, LIV Will Remain More Nuisance Than Serious Threat

Last week PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan gave his players what they wanted while copying much of the LIV Golf model. But John Hawkins writes that LIV needs to build an audience before it should be taken so seriously.

Lee Westwood was incorrigibly accurate in his recent assessment of the PGA Tour’s plan to wipe out LIV Golf as if it were a variant strain of COVID, although the summer’s pirates of prosperity aren’t nearly as dangerous as some of us would like to think. Irregardless, commissioner Jay Monahan showed up in Atlanta last week packing enough artillery to sink any threatening ship loitering in the Sea of Tranquility, where the waters were still and ran plentifully deep for decades.

Monahan’s emergency provisions came straight from the wish list of the tour pros themselves. More super-duper events with fields featuring everybody who is somebody. A gigantic infusion of prize money, and of course, a whopping 100-percent increase in that teacher’s-pet bonus at season’s end, which the Tour has taken to calling the Player Incentive Program. If bigger isn’t better, it certainly creates some fine optics, and in this war of control between the Saudis and the star-spangled Superpower, you can’t leap into battle with a twig for a sword and 20/200 vision in the cockpit.

Jay Monahan outlined a new vision for the PGA Tour last week at the Tour Championship. But was it an overreaction?  / Golffile

So Monahan is opening the vault and trying to buy his constituency’s love. Makes sense, but why didn’t some lieutenant tap the commish on the shoulder 18 months ago? Westwood, the wry Englishman who has always appeared one sentence away from breaking out a full-blown smirk, had a good cackle over the obvious similarities between the Tour’s plan of action and the infrastructure as outlined in the LIV playbook.

What’s the boss supposed to do? Cut purses in half and kill the social-media contest? It’s easy to pick on Monahan for creating a mimic of the gimmick, but it’s not like Greg Norman holds a patent on business strategies they teach in middle school. Besides, if the Shark is so smart, why is he still carrying around that hatchet like some drunken lumberjack, unable to get over the notion that Camp Ponte Vedra hijacked his world-tour master plan almost 30 years ago.

Get over it, my man. Just because your chocolate-chip cookies taste good doesn’t mean 20 other mothers in the neighborhood don’t have the same recipe.

“A day late and a dollar short,” Norman posted on Instagram in response to the Tour’s new 20-event minimum and 12 elevated tournaments with $20 million purses. FoxSports.com referred to the comment as “cheeky” and a “hilarious swipe,” owing to the fact that the guy who owns the company is Australian and likes to stir things up. It might also verify the perception that the network suffers from an alarming lack of depth in golf knowledge, or that televising the U.S. Open does not come with on-the-job training.

Cheeky? Seriously?

Enter Westwood, who had no trouble depositing those U.S.-based checks during a brief career rebirth in March 2021. “I laugh at what the PGA Tour players have come up with,” he said last week. “It’s just a copy of what LIV is doing. There are a lot of hypocrites out there.”

He also mentioned the proposed no-cut edict—a LIV lure but a compromise the Tour had never come close to considering. The day such a breach of common sense becomes ratified would amount to one of the darkest in the history of pro golf. “Hopefully, at some point, they will all choke on their words,” Westwood added, displaying unusual vitriol for a man who has spent his entire career lounging in the lap of luxury.

In redesigning the game’s competitive structure based solely on showcasing and rewarding its top-tier performers, why would anyone even ponder the notion of abolishing the 36-hole qualifier? It cheapens the product. It reduces the importance of playing well. It compensates guys who did not meet a standard that has been in place for as long as the world’s best players have been sticking a peg in the ground. It’s hard to imagine that Tiger Woods, whose presence in Delaware two weeks ago went a long way toward shaping the players’ voice on the changes—whose consecutive-cut streak (144) is one of the greatest accomplishments in sports history—emerged as an advocate on the matter.

The next four months represent a crucial window of opportunity for LIV Golf. Given the defection of so many quality international players from the PGA Tour, the Presidents Cup has basically been ruined. Not that it generated much attention, anyway, but its status as a less-intense, out-of-season gathering made it a week the participants enjoyed. Next month’s affair is just a picnic without a purpose, and a momentum-killer given that two of the last three Prez Cups have been highly competitive.

With about half of its would-be roster now ineligible, the depletion of the International squad might rank as LIV Golf’s most notable accomplishment. That’s why the rest of 2022 is a vital growth period for the sassy upstart—Norman and his muckraking marauders have done very little, if anything, to draw legitimate public interest to their product.

Fewer than 75,000 viewers hopped on YouTube to watch the final round of LIV’s third event, which was played in northwest New Jersey. That’s at least 10 times smaller an audience than a weekday round at the weakest PGA Tour event on the schedule and nowhere close to the numbers compiled by the LPGA. Norman can talk until the end of next week about how much progress his league has made in less than three months, but it’s hollow hype at best, hogwash at worst.

Think about it. The LIV infiltration has unforeseeably sprouted into one of the year’s biggest sports topics. Its public-awareness quotient is off the charts. Its identity is obviously mixed to great extremes, but it has one, which is primarily all that counts. In this case, however, the difference between recognition and interest is so massive that the organization has virtually no chance of getting (and staying) airborne in its current state.

Without any televisual presence, the enterprise is doomed. It’s an invisible athletic entity that makes all kinds of noise and loves every ounce of attention it can muster, but nobody can see it. Very, very few people want to. In other words, Monahan almost certainly overreacted when he busted out the Tour’s prolific financial reserves and spent it on appeasing the men who make his mighty empire so powerful.

Sensible leaders do whatever it takes, however, to protect their property and maintain prosperity. Defense wins championships, negligence can wreck the franchise. The tour pros probably should have had access to that bounty of riches long ago, so it’s all a simple matter of perspective. That little ship way out yonder? It’s not a threat. Just a nuisance.