Maybe someone is reciting the Eternal Rest Prayer for LIV Golf. I do not know. There is no intention of dancing on a grave here. However, this is an appropriate time to repeat the words of baseball’s poetic seventh commissioner, Bart Giamattiin his 1989 eulogy for Pete Rose’s baseball career:
“Pete Rose’s life ban from baseball is the sad end to an unfortunate episode. One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts that have stained the game, and now must live with the consequences of those acts.”
LIV Golf has stained golf. Not at golf like millions of us play, because we are just worker bees in this vast universe of golf, sleeping in cars to Bethpage Black tee times, thanks if Collin Morikawa is willing to look our way at any point in the FedEx St. Jude Championship without cut-free. No, the insidious thing that LIV Golf did was to make professional golf, in its most northern part, seem more ordinary, less special, more like everything in this world of show-me-the-money.
There was something rugged and gorgeous about the PGA Tour cut that I came to as a fan and occasional caddy in the 1970s and 80s. All those independent entrepreneurs. The players were cowboys, really. There were vestiges of that world still in place when Tiger Woods began to prove its golf superiority in the 1990s and in this century. That tour was already dead. LIV Golf shot the fatal final round.
The modern, new-look, PE-powered PGA Tour now rising from the ashes of the old one might entertain you, or not. (Many of us were there for the sport of everything.) Of course, it will give you something that you can play as you examine the trends week on week in the shots gained: par-5 played with extra-long tees. (Many of us were just to watch a hard thing done in art.) However, I am happy that Chi Chi Rodriguez had his consideration of the Hall of Fame when he did, because his golf results did not support “metrics”. But it was a joy to watch. That swing and life, and now it is embedded in Pinehurst, next to it Donald Ross.
LIV Golf, in the end, was its people, as all institutions are, and LIV Golf’s money bombs have left a stain on some of the most dynamic figures in the modern game. Maybe I should say they spilled dirt on themselves. This is an incomplete list of minors: Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Bubba Watson; diverse and talented South Africans and Australians; various European Ryder Cup stars, Jon Rahm chief among them; Pat Perez, of course – you can’t leave Pat Perez off this list. And, first of all, Mr. Phil Mickelson, one of the most exciting figures in the history of the game. At 50 he became the oldest golfer to win a major championship.
It was thrilling, what he did in Kiawah, in the PGA Championship in 2021. At 51, he retired, in the name (he claims) of strengthening professional golf.
As if professional golf had to be redone. It wasn’t. It just needs to be tweaked. It needed to evolve, like all living things. It was Phil who opened the doors to LIV Golf for others, because he was at the top of the food chain. When he won that PGA Championship, he was the most famous figure in the game. For a minute, it was Arnold. Arnold Palmer.
I wrote this message in your direction for several decades and I did it again, but this time more carefully: There was something magical and otherworldly in Hagen, Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, Norman, Seve. There was something magical about the meritocratic world they created for Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau, and Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter and Graeme McDowell when they brought their exciting, heightened games to this side of the Atlantic.
Please don’t talk about Milton Friedman and the power of the market. LIV Golf does not operate in any kind of real market. It was not a competitive golf league on the PGA and European tours. It was an effort by a group of Saudi oil billionaires to buy a seat at the table of this ancient and special game that, through the centuries, has really stood for something. You can’t buy your way into it, which was actually one of the things I stood for. But no one said that Yasir Al-Rumayyangovernor of Saudi Arabia misnamed Public Investment Fund and LIV Golf bankroller. For starters, Greg Norman sold on a concept of golf as a team sport.
But golf is not a team sport. Here and there, yes, but week to week, no. The LIV model, the Crushers and all those other teams with their ridiculous names, never made sense. Golf is a sport for those of us who are attracted to notions of self-sufficiency. You have the opportunity to practice that thing on every tournament shot, in every practice session, in every offseason. I love team sports because they are about teamwork. I love golf because it is not.
I think Rory McIlroy was off-the-mark about something the other day (and good for him to talk and share and be out there). In a press conference before the Abu Dhabi tournament this week, he said: “Talk to Jack Nicklaus or any of these older guys, they would have loved for LIV to come in their day. They would have made more money. And we all make more money because of (LIV).” It seems that McIlroy is repeating what he heard Nicklaus say. (Rory lives and plays at Bear’s Club in South Florida, founded by Nicklaus.) I’ve heard Gary Player, and others, say the same thing.
But in their heyday, when they were in the thick of it, Nicklaus and Player thought they were making huge sums, and they didn’t think of golf as a get-rich-quick scheme anyway. They loved the competition, the travel, the life, the side hustles—and even the money. I happened to be at the 1985 Las Vegas Invitational, when Curtis Strange won and collected $171,000. No one could believe it, the sum was so vast. Jack’s payout for winning the 1986 Masters was $144,000. No one was picketing on Washington Road in the name of higher wages.
In 1987, the movie “Wall Street” was released. You probably know the slogan that came from it: Greed is good. You may forget that the character who says, Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas), goes to prison for an insider-trading conviction. What would be the equivalent in the golf tournament? Share the information on which club you hit? What tracks. Conventional players – the rule book doesn’t allow it.
I was surprised that the rules committee of the Masters did not penalize Brooks Koepka to flash five fingers for the benefit of Gary Woodland on the 15th hole of the first round in the Masters 2023. It seemed obvious to me what he was doing, signaling that he had just hit a 5 iron, for the second delicate shot over a pond. All of this makes you wonder if golf is losing its way: The parade of stars that left the tour that made them suggest that it has; that moment Koepka at the Masters also does.
Through the nineties and really since, greed is good has taken on a life of its own. Everything goes he is his first cousin. Maybe we are finally in a correction. Maybe LIV’s death is part of it. Called two shots on McIlroy for being too aggressive with the flange of his wedge when dealing with a bad shot this week, same.
Bart Giamatti, banishing Rose in 1989, concludes thus:
“The matter of Mr. Rose is now closed. It will be discussed and discussed. Let no one think that he did not hurt baseball. That hurt will pass, however, as the great glory of the game is asserted and a resistant institution advances. Let it also be clear that no individual is superior to the game.”
For our purposes, below in golf in order baseball. Everything else, stet. In Arnold Palmer’s professional life, he practiced Giamatti’s final sentence. He always put the game before himself. Good manners, as well as good business practice.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
