The news hit our inboxes, Twitter feeds and smartphones, and we didn’t believe it. Was it April Fools’ Day? A spoof email? Had the PGA Tour website been hacked? It was a bombshell that had come out of nowhere.
The PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, which backs LIV Golf, have joined forces and the game appears to no longer be fractured. The PIF will be the exclusive investor in the new unnamed and for-profit entity, which will combine the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV Golf.
It’s been a messy, ugly and bizarre last 12-and-a-bit months and I didn’t like where the fractured future of the men’s professional sport was going. So my initial reaction to this is that it can only be a good thing.
My other reaction is ‘oh wow this is going to take another 12 months to sort out’.
A fractured sport was already starting to look less for wear. The Players Championship in March, supposedly the ‘fifth’ Major and one of the strongest fields in golf, was a relatively damp squib without its defending champion or any of the LIV players like Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson. You could feel that the ‘product’ had been weakened.
The PGA Championship numbers were the lowest since 2008 despite an excellent tournament. This, to me, showed that the sport was perhaps struggling to reach that mainstream audience as more casual fans began to lose interest. They didn’t know who was playing where, there was too much golf on and the best players weren’t playing against each other enough. Hell, we didn’t even know who the best players in the world were anymore due to LIV’s lack of world ranking points.
Then there’s the DP World Tour seeing some of its big names like Garcia, Stenson, Westwood and Poulter resigning their memberships and essentially being forced to leave the tour that they all still love.
And the Ryder Cup’s record points scorer Sergio Garcia never being captain? Poulter the ‘Postman’ never being captain? Henrik Stenson being stripped of the captaincy. It’s been a wild last year for the men’s game.
LIV Golf did an impressive job in assembling a mostly-star roster with some of the sport’s biggest names. Are they the game’s best players? Not all of them, but they were some of the golf’s most well known figures and characters who we all had grown to know and enjoy watching and hearing from. Not seeing them week-in, week-out playing in big, historic PGA Tour events was a huge loss for viewers.
The LIV format certainly has its fans but the success of it is…
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