ATLANTA (AP) — Golf’s season of discontent reaches its official stopping point this weekend at the Tour Championship.
Predicting where the sport goes from here is sort of like trying to hole a shot from the fairway.
The PGA Tour was woefully slow in reacting to the challenge from upstart, Saudi-backed LIV Golf. When it finally mustered a defense on the historic grounds of East Lake Golf Club, it seemed nothing more than a bunch of warmed-over ideas pulled straight from rebel tour’s playbook.
Mainly, it comes down to this: The top PGA Tour players will commit to taking part in a series of tournaments with heightened importance beginning in 2023, and they’ll all be cashing some enormous paychecks for their trouble.
Sound familiar?
The leader of LIV Golf sure thought so. Greg Norman quickly jumped on social media to gloat over the PGA Tour largely copying what his tour is already doing.
“A day late and a dollar short,” he wrote.
More initiatives were unveiled by PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, but any talk of growing the game or bringing in new fans is sure to take a backseat to the staggering amounts of money being thrown around by both tours.
Golf has always been a game for the rich and powerful, and nearly everything that’s happened over the past few months will only solidify that image for potential fans outside the top income bracket, those folks who aren’t fretting over their yacht qualifying for a tax deduction.
Monahan was asked point-blank if the PGA Tour should have taken the LIV threat more seriously.
He shrugged it off, seemingly welcoming the competition while insisting that his more established tour will win out in the end.
“There’s competition everywhere,” he said. “We’re competing against other leagues. We’re competing for younger eyeballs. We’re competing to grow internationally. We’re competing to grow our sport relative to other sports. That’s the nature of what we do.”
But Monahan sounded a bit naive when he talked of the PGA Tour relying on more than checks with lots of zeros to fend off a foe with a seemingly blank check from the Saudi royal family, endorsed to anyone who’s good at swinging a club and willing to overlook the regime’s egregious record on human rights.
Monahan used words like “history” and “legacy” and “sense of purpose” to describe the non-monetary value of sticking with the established tour.
In reality, the only words that matter to most players: “Show me the money.”
