The Battle for Golf Supremacy is Over, and LIV Has Lost

The PGA Tour survived departures for the Saudi-backed league and strengthened its competition. Perhaps only the majors can save LIV, Michael Rosenberg writes, and that's a longshot.

Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm gave LIV Golf some credit this week when they said it has benefited all elite male golfers, including them. So, in the words of a golf legend, LIV Golf has that going for it, which is nice.

LIV Golf has already lost its battle with the PGA Tour. Whatever happens in courtrooms and to golf rankings over the next year will not change that. With its new schedule featuring elevated events, the PGA Tour has co-opted the one argument in favor of LIV: That the best players in the world will compete against each other. The PGA Tour has also minimized the incentive for anybody to leave for LIV now—top players can make a fortune, and lesser players should have a clearer path to becoming top players.

Most importantly, the Tour has solidified its reputation as the premier men’s golf league in the world. This week’s Players Championship will be missing its defending champion, the since-defected Cam Smith, but Smith will miss the Players more than the Players will miss him. As a competitive entity, LIV Golf has zero credibility. It will never give Smith the platform or feeling he had at TPC Sawgrass last March.

The defending champion of the Players is not playing this week yet is hardly missed on a PGA Tour riding a wave of momentum with high-profile events.  / Courtesy LIV Golf

LIV Golf is a morally indefensible operation, funded by the murderous, propaganda-spreading Saudi Arabian government with no plausible business plan. But even if you forget where the money is coming from, you cannot forget it is there. For every single player who joined LIV, money was the No. 1 factor. There are no exceptions. Any golf fan understands this.

Yes, players run for the money in other sports all the time. But they switch teams, not leagues. (Soccer is an exception, but soccer has been embedded in the culture of so many countries for so long that comparing it to another sport is impossible.) When Gerrit Cole signed with the Yankees, we knew he went for the money, but also that he would try just as hard to pitch well there as he did in Houston or Pittsburgh. He still wants to win the World Series.

LIV golfers just want to make as much money as they can between majors, which leaves them two options: Admit it, and expose their league for the competitive farce that it is, or lie about it … and expose their league for the competitive farce that it is.

With the exception of Dustin Johnson, LIV’s top players have lied so often about their reasons for joining LIV that every time they talk, all I hear is other people laughing. They said they wanted to control their schedule, but they control it less. They said they want to grow the game, but who is watching? They talk about the team aspect like we’re supposed to get excited about the Four Birdies or Triple Salchows or whatever the hell the teams are called, and they’re not fooling anybody. Are we supposed to believe that Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed suddenly care most about lifting a team? I’d sooner believe that James Harden just wants to play defense.

Every LIV hype video looks like a parody, and every promotional effort accomplishes the exact opposite of its goal: It just convinces more people that these guys sold out.

This will prick Greg Norman’s ego, which bothers me not at all, and anyway it’s true: LIV’s best hope for commercial success was copying the PGA Tour as much as possible. Forget the team charade. Hold 72-hole stroke-play formats; maybe mix in the occasional match-play event for fun. Find some meaningful way to reward the winners. Then maybe LIV could convince people it was staging the best men’s golf event of a given weekend.

Now? Why watch? How many people love Cam Smith so much that they miss watching him on a regular basis? To put it another way: How large is his family?

This brings up the other problem with LIV as entertainment: We still see enough of these guys. We’ll watch them at the majors, as long as they qualify—and if they don’t qualify, we won’t want to see them. Golf is not a highlight-driven sport. Fans know that bad weekend golfers make aces sometimes, mediocre players can hit amazing shots, and some of the longest hitters in the world are not among the world’s top 1,000 players. Greatness is defined by playing consistent all-around great golf under pressure. There is nothing a LIV golfer can do to make us think “Wow, that guy is one of the best in the world” if he isn’t doing it against the best players in the world in a truly competitive environment.

For decades, golf fans have noted the difference between winning a regular PGA Tour event and a major. Koepka’s entire reputation was built around that difference. Are we supposed to pretend he can prove his mettle in a 54-hole shotgun-start carnival act just because three other guys are wearing the same shirt as him?

LIV’s only hope is that its players win more majors than PGA Tour players—and do so for long enough that golf fans decide LIV is a better product. I am extremely skeptical that will ever happen. The Tour still has a deeper pool of top players. They are getting superior preparation because they play meaningful events against each other. What LIV really needs is for one star to go on the kind of major-championship heater that Koepka was on a few years ago. But those are rare—and far more likely to come from a current PGA Tour star like McIlroy or Rahm.

LIV golfers are starting to discover what even hardcore golf fans have understood for years: They are really not that big of a deal. There have only been a few golfers in history who had the crossover appeal that, say, Dennis Rodman had, and Rodman was rarely even the best player on his own NBA team.

In the last 20 years, famous golfers made just enough money to buy mansions, employ sycophants and lose touch with reality if they weren’t careful. Some LIV golfers understand they went for the money and are at peace with the consequences. But the guys who imagine themselves to be stars, like Koepka and DeChambeau, are going to slowly discover that the world doesn’t really miss them. It takes years to build a popular sports league. Maybe the Saudis and Norman are patient enough to wait. But what great athlete wants to spend his 30s trying to get back to where he was in his 20s?

Some LIV golfers will get antsy and grow unhappy. Some will blame their agents, fairly or not. Some will try to find an escape hatch, but the Saudi government isn’t so big on letting employees walk, and LIV will lose, regardless. Meanwhile, Rahm and McIlroy and Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas and the bunch will keep on living the best professional lives that any group of golfers ever lived. LIV Golf has been a much better deal for the guys who didn’t join than for those who did.