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Saudi World Golf Tour 2022/2023 Thread

donaldross said:
James Piot is the current US Amateur champion. He is 23 years old and turned Professional last month.

Ya'll are saying he should have done more by now? Done what more? Win on the PGA tour? Make the cut at the Masters?

Ya'll are saying the guy is trash. So funny.
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Andy Ogletree sucks too.
 
guitardeac said:
DeacHawk, your post makes a good point but I think you just described in bold why LIV will fail. That guy wins and you prove what a shitty tour it is. It's just an exhibition tour and nobody cares about what's on exhibit.

Pick 48 Korn Ferry tour players and have them play in this event and I guarantee you the winner comes from the Korn Ferry tour and the avg finish will be tons better.
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I think you're exaggerating when you guarantee the winner comes from the KFT (the top 5-10 making the jump are legit top 100 guys), though I agree the average finish would be better from the KFT guys.

As for DR's assertion concerning the top Euros, here are the top Euros playing the PGA/DP: Rahm, Hovland, McIlroy, Fitzpatrick, Hatton, Lowry, Casey, Pieters, Fairway Jesus, Power, Straka, Arnaus, Rose and Noren - all ranked in the top 60. The only Euro taking the jump ranked in the top 60 is Garcia, and he's played like crap the last couple of years. The 40 something Euros leaving are all well past their primes, except for maybe Bland, who has been playing the best golf of his life the last year. In terms of DP tour quality, the guys they're losing who hurt the most are Wiesberger, Horsefield, Larrazabal and Otaegui. And the PGA and DP losing the RSA contingent doesn't hurt either. Schwartzel and Grace are no longer top 100 players and wouldn't make the PC team. And Louis was still playing well up till last year, but he's fallen off in the last several months due to worsening back issues.

I do think the guys resigning from the PGA/DP like Na and the RSA contingent are doing the smart thing. I imagine the PGA/DP will treat their re-entry in a more lenient manner than those who try to play both and who sue the tours. Other than the few guys who will still likely play in this year's majors, if any of these guys want to play in more than 8 events per year, their option will likely be the Asian tour.
 
For Deac's Sake said:
Sure seems like selective moral outrage on this. Saudi Aramco spends $100M+ to be the title sponsor for Formula 1 and to sponsor the Saudi Grand Prix, but you don’t hear shit about that.
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There has actually been quite a bit of controversy about Aramco's sponsorship and the Saudi GP although it doesn't get that much coverage in the American press. Hamilton and Vettel have been especially outspoken about human rights issues in KSA and both had rainbow flags on their helmets at the race.
 
donaldross said:
James Piot is the current US Amateur champion. He is 23 years old and turned Professional last month.

Ya'll are saying he should have done more by now? Done what more? Win on the PGA tour? Make the cut at the Masters?

Ya'll are saying the guy is trash. So funny.
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God damn you love to square up against some straw men.
 
Deac6 said:
Andy Ogletree sucks too.
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Ogletree is doing this because he is disillusioned with a system that kept giving sponsor invites to John Augenstein over him, in spite of Ogletree beating Augenstein to win the US Am.

And obviously he needs to play better in the limited chances he gets, but he has found the path to tour starts pretty much blocked off.
 
LIV offered Alex Fitzpatrick and Eugenio Chacarra a $2 million bonus to join the LIV Tour, among a bunch of other top rated Ams. Both have turned down the offer, for now.
 
It sure has proven profitable to turn down LIV. They keep coming back with more money on the 2nd and 3rd attempts.

Big moment for those who got through Sectional qualifying yesterday. The prize money from finishing in top 5 at Brookline is a drop in the bucket for what they would be offered a week from Monday.
 
That shows how desperate they are to get even mediocre talent into their starter kit golf league. I'm sure Talor Gooch was on their top of their shopping list.
 
Liquid Karma said:
Ogletree is doing this because he is disillusioned with a system that kept giving sponsor invites to John Augenstein over him, in spite of Ogletree beating Augenstein to win the US Am.

And obviously he needs to play better in the limited chances he gets, but he has found the path to tour starts pretty much blocked off.
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Which is objectively funny.
 
Liquid Karma said:
That shows how desperate they are to get even mediocre talent into their starter kit golf league. I'm sure Talor Gooch was on their top of their shopping list.
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Look, the competition will get way better when Jason Kokrak signs on for the next event!
 
DCDeac said:
I mean, James Piot has played in 5 PGA Tour events this year. He's missed the cut in all 5 and hasn't posted a round under par yet.

So yeah, if your argument is that he's a strong piece of a competitive professional golf field, he could have done more.
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So it sounds like a great deal for him. He could show up and might make more in the LIV events he plays than he ever would have on the PGA Tour.
 
If your position is that LIV, ought, in its opening event have a superior field to the Canadian Open (a fairly typical event), you are correct that they will not.

But here is the link the Canadian Open field: https://www.pgatour.com/tournaments/rbc-canadian-open/field.html


I’d say the LIV event is behind slightly. Stupid money goes a long way. Of course, if the money ends, it will end. But given that they just saved 800 million from going to Tiger my guess is it will be at least a decade before that happens.
 
deacz said:
So it sounds like a great deal for him. He could show up and might make more in the LIV events he plays than he ever would have on the PGA Tour.
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Yeah. To be clear, I can root for the LIV tour to fail because I think a racist/sexist/homophobic/murdering government built on oppression is throwing money at celebrities to curry favor with the West so they can keep on doing horrible things. And at the same time understand that when James Piot got a look at how hard it is to compete on tour, and how far he is from even being able to sniff a tour card, that getting millions to simply end up on Dustin Johnson's team a few times in joke events is tough to pass up. Which is exactly why I applaud Alex for rejecting the opportunity.

Hell, I can even recognize that the impact of the LIV tour on the PGA Tour is partially positive. It will pressure them to improve payouts, give more paths to earning money, and potentially better and more creative experiences for viewers.

But there's a line, obviously. If a country leveraged slavery to fund a rival football league to the NFL, paid every starter on current NFL teams $500M each to play 10 games in the middle of the NFL's season - it wouldn't get off the ground. It wouldn't matter if they put go-pro's and mic's on every player. There wouldn't be any ends justifying the means arguments. There's no effort to make a profit or even break even here. The entire endeavor is a nefarious one, despite all the bullshit about "growing the game" or "expanding the reach of golf." Nobody cares about any of that at a level that even approaches the weight of the actual money.
 
The question is how long will the Saudi government want to continue throwing vast sums of money away with little to no return on their "investment". There is no business model here at all. They'll get some gate money for the fans they get to attend, but they're streaming it for free, and as far as I can tell, they have no corporate sponsors. I get losing money early in a venture that you think will eventually make money. So you're going to throw half a billion to a billion per year, and there is no scenario where you're going to eventually recoup even half that? I would have thought that if they were going to get this far down the road they'd at least have a TV partner (I'm assuming Fox Sports) and a handful of corporate sponsors lined up.
 
JuiceCrewAllStar said:
what is the Saudi's play here?

is it just global goodwill thing to or a prestige cultural play?

because it cannot be a money-making operation
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BeachBumDeac said:
reputation laundering
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And showing how easy it is to harm established American institutions.

Good thing they’re only targeting elite US culture. If they really wanted to do some damage, they’d throw a billion toward college football NIL or to fund a SEC-league breakaway league. See how quickly concerns about universities taking foreign money would go away.
 
Seems like DR's position has shifted.

Before it was golfers will win a legal battle with PGA Tour because the Tour is a greedy monopoly discriminating against poor independent contractors. Now, we don't hear about how great the legal argument is because, as the LIV Tour has demonstrated, the PGA Tour is not a monopoly as LIV is now a rival tour that is happy to pay PGA players with Saudi money from inflated up gas prices. So, with the realization that its going to be pretty hard for DJ with $125 million falling out of pockets to claim that PGA Tour has damaged him, by barring him from the Barbasol Classic, the fallback argument is that everyone, except for loyal idiots, is going to leave the PGA Tour.

While this has always been the better argument, its so revealing to see how DR is so giddy about the idea of a massive cash grab of dirty money as if greed justifies everything. FWIW, don't think its a coincidence that two of the LIV events will be played on Trump courses as the PGA moved the PGA Championship from a Trump course. This is also about petty revenge. Another weird fetish of our former President, which is angle that also gets DR excited.

Doesn't matter that the money comes from a murderous oppressive regime that beheads its own citizens for peacefully protesting government action, seeking equal rights for women, or exercising freedom of religion. Guess it makes DR feel like a player to advocate for the privileged few,
 
In other news, Tiger will not play in the US Open next week.
 
I read on TGC that Phil won't be resigning his PGA tour membership like most of the others. So Greg has his plaintiff. Everyone else appears to be going out of their way not to piss off the PGA/DP tours, but Phil is still tilting against that windmill. Therapy does not appear to have helped make him any more self aware.
 
His whole argument is pretty much based around restructuring the tour, so he's gotta take em head on. Or else he needs to just scream show me the money
 
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