Saudi World Golf Tour 2022/2023 Thread

[Biff Tannen]

The point is that being a PGA tour golfer is not the same as being an NBA player. A lot of PGA players don't make a ton of money, they do actually get injured and fatigued, and they do have to show up every week.

 

[Shake]

Want to know why the Travelers has a great field this week? Its because they have a $2M plus pool from the title sponsor to pay players to come.

 

[DCDeac]

Bryson won a major and yet his most career-defining moment was that drive on the par 5 at Arnie's place last year. But why? I think the LIV talking heads would have you believe it's because people love seeing someone bomb it because Bryson is so incredible!

But if that was the case, the long drive tour and the 500 dudes who can hit it past Bryson would be a threat to PGA Tour viewership. It mattered in Bryson's case because he did it during actual PGA Tour events. Successfully. When you remove the measuring stick of the PGA Tour it loses any real meaning - which is something kinda unique to golf. Most people can't dunk a basketball over someone, most can't hit a 100mph fastball 420 feet, most can't run an out pattern in 5 seconds and catch a deep throw against another elite athlete or stop a 350 pound rusher. But pretty much everyone who plays golf has birdied a tough hole, hit a 300 yard drive, or made a 50 foot putt. It's the competition, the pressure, the consistency over 4 rounds, and the course difficulty that makes it compelling even if outlier capabilities like Bryson's distance have an impact. The actual outlier is the stage and the consistency though, not someone being longer than average or being a better putter than most.

That's the core issue with LIV - they basically pay everyone in some form or another, there's no cut, the rule are lax, the competition is weak even if they upgrade it with a few big names because it has no depth by design. It'll offer some entertainment, probably push the PGA to up purses and opportunities. I just don't know how long some of these guys are going to be content to play exhibitions plus some majors even with the money. Not to mention I doubt they'll stay in major-winning form playing LIV events. I get the Bland-types who aren't competitive and can't turn down free money, but I don't think the bluff holds with the competitive guys. If they get locked out of DP and PGA events they'll either buckle or return the day their contracts with LIV expire. After the initial money lands I just don't see a guy like Bryson coasting on LIV events and barely making cuts in majors and being fine with that being the end of his career.

 

[deacz]

Ok, disagree that it's not real. Has been real the whole time. PGA Tour screwed this up and still is.

But at lease you have us a list. I bet someone on that list flips in the next month. And stately Wake Forest alums will still pretend all is well.

Yes, it is a list. We shall see, but if one of those players flips, this Wake Forest alum will not pretend all is well.

More likely though, Augusta holds the cards. If they refuse entry to all LIV players except those who have automatic exemptions (or prior Masters winners, or simply ban them all), then goodnight LIV as anything more than an insanely lucrative early retirement home for professional golfers.

 

[deacon14]

It will only get real when a successful and likeable young player such as Rory, Spieth, Thomas, Morikawa, or Zalatoris leaves. Don't see that happening and it looks like the Tour will adjust to compete as well (a good thing).

Ok, disagree that it's not real. Has been real the whole time. PGA Tour screwed this up and still is.

But at lease you have us a list. I bet someone on that list flips in the next month. And stately Wake Forest alums will still pretend all is well.

Want to make an on the record prediction on which of those 5 guys you bet will flip? Your options are: the guy who said on twitter today he will not be leaving (Morikawa), two very high profile guys that have been very outspoken against LIV (Thomas, Rory), and two well-liked guys under 29 years old that have shown no public signs whatsoever of being interested in LIV (Zalatoris, Spieth).

 

[WilmingtonDeac]

I consume quite a bit of golf coverage week to week and my biggest question with LIV (from a TV perspective) is how they ever plan to turn a final day shotgun start into must see TV. That format is just not condusive to the endings necessary to make a large number of folks tune in on Saturdays.

 

[donaldross]

I consume quite a bit of golf coverage week to week and my biggest question with LIV (from a TV perspective) is how they ever plan to turn a final day shotgun start into must see TV. That format is just not condusive to the endings necessary to make a large number of folks tune in on Saturdays.

I actually think they just want the whole market 30 years from now. It might be a wise move, it might not. Business is business. We add up who won and who lost every year on April 15 in this country.

The saudis probably don't have the annual winner/loser scorecards we sign each April/October. But they get to make their own business decisions. And so do we. We obviously unfortunately will not get all the great golf in our country going forward. I'm sure the Euro fans felt the same when we stole all their players too. Lee Westwood never moved to Jupiter, Florida because he liked us or it. It was all money. Just like the Russian hockey players don't come here because they like our national anthem.

It's all money, it's always been money. We were delusional to think otherwise.

 

[Frosty]

I consume quite a bit of golf coverage week to week and my biggest question with LIV (from a TV perspective) is how they ever plan to turn a final day shotgun start into must see TV. That format is just not condusive to the endings necessary to make a large number of folks tune in on Saturdays.

I'm not sure how this format can be effectively wrangled for TV. Using the US Open as an example, you would have had three guys on two separate holes with two of them attempting to force a playoff and one putting for the win (or a number of other iterations depending on how the ball bounced).

If you limit this past weekend to 54 holes you would have had to be following Fitz and Z finishing up at -4, Rahm at -3, and Keegan/Hadwin/Scottie at -2. None of them played in the same group that day either.

At the WM this year Scheffler and Cantlay went into a playoff at -16, but you had three other guys finish at -15 and two more at -14, so all of them would have still been in it on the last hole of a similar format.

The second there is a super crowded board at the top it'll be a cluster fuck and will take a few minutes to figure out what happened, and not in an exciting way.

 

[tigerswood]

Yeah, shotgun play is good for boozefest country club tournaments where you have a shootout after with all the flight winners, not for top level amateur or professional competition. It will never work.

 

[ABCDeac]

LIV has to figure out the television rights/broadcasting, and has to figure out a way to really distinguish itself from the PGA Tour in some way other than more money for shittier golf. If it does that, it will have a chance to stay around forever, and maybe even in future years it could be profitable year-to-year. Unlikely it can recoup the huge signing bonuses ever, but I don't think the Saudis care too much about that.

To me, the most unique and potentially-compelling thing about LIV is the team aspect, and that is how the shotgun start broadcasting would work and be interesting. If Sergio is the 4th best player on his 4-person team, and you somehow care about his team, then him having a putt on the 7th hole (his 18th) to possibly win the team competition, even if he is in 30th place in the tournament, is theoretically important and would make for good TV.

Similar to the FedEx cup - no one cares about that thing at all, EXCEPT in the final rounds of the final regular season tournament and the playoffs when you know a guy is on the bubble. Even if he is out of the tournament, but will either advance or not based on his next couple of holes, the gimmick works.

The fact that LIV is sort of made up of the players who people think of as assholes (Na, Reed, Koepka, Sergio, Bryson, etc.) makes for an obvious potential dynamic of "good teams" v. "bad teams" - in a crazy way, like professional wrestling back in the day - such that people could care about the single events, the season-long competition, the lower-performing players etc. Have some minor-league event where guys qualify and replace the lowest-performing team players and you have a little bit of more interest. But to pull this off, they need obvious "good team" guys who aren't scrubs and they don't really have that. Phil maybe could have been, until he started drunk talking to Shipnuck.

It is important to note that the PGA Tour went to the PIP program last year where the top 10 "move the needle" guys got significant bonuses. LIV now has 4 of those 10 signed up. That is meaningful and has to scare the shit out of the PGAT, particularly given the fact that we know Tiger is not going to play the tour anymore.

 

[donaldross]

I giggled at Rahm's comments--and many of yours--that golf has "for centuries been played as 72 hole stroke play with a cut."

So false. The British Open was 36 holes for almost as long as it has been 72. The PGA Championship, hell until recently, was match play. Sometimes it would go 200 holes. Hell the US Open used to played on a 9 hole golf course with no cut and damn sure no 72 holes.

It's all just comical watching these folks talk otherwise. Golf changes. And it will keep changing. If the Majors want to remain the dominant force in golf they will have to be smart about it. The PGA Championship was smart to get away from the same date as the British. And then smart again to move to May. They always adapt to keep themselves relevant. Just like they will adapt again to include Koepka, Bryson, and all of the world's top players in their fields. If the OWGR won't play ball, they will use another metric to ensure they have the top fields. If they don't have the top fields, other events will become majors.

 

[Frosty]

I giggled at Rahm's comments--and many of yours--that golf has "for centuries been played as 72 hole stroke play with a cut."

So false. The British Open was 36 holes for almost as long as it has been 72. The PGA Championship, hell until recently, was match play. Sometimes it would go 200 holes. Hell the US Open used to played on a 9 hole golf course with no cut and damn sure no 72 holes.

It's all just comical watching these folks talk otherwise. Golf changes. And it will keep changing. If the Majors want to remain the dominant force in golf they will have to be smart about it. The PGA Championship was smart to get away from the same date as the British. And then smart again to move to May. They always adapt to keep themselves relevant. Just like they will adapt again to include Koepka, Bryson, and all of the world's top players in their fields. If the OWGR won't play ball, they will use another metric to ensure they have the top fields. If they don't have the top fields, other events will become majors.

Obviously the majors want to continue to have the top fields in the sport, hence the whole point of being majors. What remains to be seen is if the guys jumping to LIV will actually be top field guys a year from now if they only play competitively on mickey mouse course setups a dozen times a year outside of the majors. The majors are insulated enough from needing star power to draw viewers if those guys' games regress to the point where they're struggling to make cuts.

No idea if this will happen, but it's an unknown variable that needs to be considered because I don't think we can safely assume that playing in the LIV events is going to make these guys any better or even not cause their games to regress.

 

[Les Grossman]

I found the PGA Tour’s reported response today to the LIV tour quite humorous. For weeks we’ve been hearing a 50 player field with no cut and guaranteed money is not a proper tournament. So, what’s the original idea the tour came up with to keep their top players happy in response to LIV? A 50 player field with no cut and guaranteed money.

 

[donaldross]

Obviously the majors want to continue to have the top fields in the sport, hence the whole point of being majors. What remains to be seen is if the guys jumping to LIV will actually be top field guys a year from now if they only play competitively on mickey mouse course setups a dozen times a year outside of the majors. The majors are insulated enough from needing star power to draw viewers if those guys' games regress to the point where they're struggling to make cuts.

No idea if this will happen, but it's an unknown variable that needs to be considered because I don't think we can safely assume that playing in the LIV events is going to make these guys any better or even not cause their games to regress.

Likewise, playing on the PGA Tour can make you regress. Spieth, Sergio, Iceman are examples of folks who can bounce quickly from 150 to 5 and back again. Golf is cyclical. At the Wyndham Championship, we cycle through all the best players in the world a couple years after they were in the top 10 and then a couple years before they are in the top 10.

The reality is even Justin Thomas and Colin Morikawa can fall outside the top 50. I bet one of them does at some point in the next 5 years. This isn't the NBA.

 

[For Deac's Sake]

Wow. Caught up in the jetstream. You guys are WAY overstating it. There is absolutely NO WAY - NO WAY - the impact of LIV will be enough to affect the PGA Tour in term of tournaments, sponsors, partners etc. My gosh. Absolutely absurd. This will all last a couple of months and then life moves on. Bryson does not move the PGA Tour needle. You can't even tell how far he hits it on TV and if hes the longest it is barely. Tour stars age out every year and their games drop off and they are nowhere to be found ont he leaderboard, and there's a reason the pGA Tour stays around and thrives. Tiger doesnt even play anymore and his impact to the tour and a given tournament is 50 times all of these LIV guys put together andt bhe PGA Tour still has massive TV viewership and sponsors and partners knocking down the door. It is absolutely absurd to think these guys that are taking the big up front checks are going to have any impact whatsoever on the viability of the PGA Tour.

You're already wrong...the announcement today (linked above) of the fall schedule changes are the direct result of the LIV tour. Even if it goes away next month, it will have already made a significant impact on the Tour for this one change alone.

 

[deacz]

I found the PGA Tour’s reported response today to the LIV tour quite humorous. For weeks we’ve been hearing a 50 player field with no cut and guaranteed money is not a proper tournament. So, what’s the original idea the tour came up with to keep their top players happy in response to LIV? A 50 player field with no cut and guaranteed money.

Basically adding WGC tournaments, except only for PGA Tour members.

 

[ABCDeac]

The guys who run the Masters are the smartest people in golf and will ultimately dictate how most of this plays out. If they do nothing, the next most important thing in golf is/will be money. The PGAT tried the "you don't have to apologize for playing here" for about two weeks while they worked the back channels to come up with competitive money and basically the same format. The problem with that approach is it will depend on/require the better players to play in many other events to keep the TV revenue and sponsors that will allow the PGAT to throw the bigger money at the top players, whereas LIV just gets to dip into a limitless pool of oil money and won't have the same strings. The other problem with that is the PGAT is set up as a charitable organization and that comes with legal requirements that will prevent them from matching dollar-for-dollar.

Personally, I think only two things can save the PGAT at this point: (1) Augusta, and to a lesser extent the other majors; or (2) the long game becomes long enough such that the Saudis decide to spend their money elsewhere.

The fact that Phil's published comments didn't seem to cause them any hesitation and only emboldened them to throw more money at the problem is a very ominous sign for the PGAT. The fact that two top 20 guys signed today, even amidst all the blowback, is also really bad. The fact that the USGA didn't/couldn't/wouldn't ban LIV players from playing is also bad. The fact that the price of oil has skyrocketed - also bad. All of this happening in less than 6 months suggests that the long game is not going to become long enough for the PGAT, and certainly not as we've known it for the last 50 years.

 

[PhDeac]

Good posts by ABC.

How deep is Augusta in Saudi money? Seems like that would determine their willingness to push back.

 

[donaldross]

LIV just laid out high 9 figures in signing bonuses and got an idiot who hasn't won since November 2020, a neurotic little slow playing twit who actually made Grayson Murray a sympathetic figure, a narcissistic bullshit artist, all of team UPS, a poor man's Harris English, and the wrong Koepka brother.

Great business model.

You dismissed this and said the PGA Tour should ban folks. That was wrong and wrong.

The way to handle this from the start was not to piss off the rich guy and just let folks go play. It would have defused the controversy. Instead the PGA Tour forced a choice and condemned those who left. This only raised the stakes—a battle they could not win. They kept raising everyone’s offers every time Finchem called them evil.

And players were never happy with how the tour clandestinely suspended and ostracized Phil and others. Causing even more of them not to be loyal.

Now Jay had another meeting today telling players they will have to bear the cost of the legal fees for the PGA Tour’s uncompetitive antics. More are pissed and on brink.

Monahan should start listening to his own players at these meetings and stop lecturing them. If he hasn’t figure it out yet, that plan doesn’t work.

 

[dartsndeacs]

Good posts by ABC.

How deep is Augusta in Saudi money? Seems like that would determine their willingness to push back.

If you're one of the people in charge of Augusta National, I imagine you've got a pretty good life. I don't think you want to jeopardize that by pissing off the Saudis