TULSA, OKLAHOMA | Covering the Players Championship in March was informative. It was my first Players since the 2020 event was cancelled in mid-swing, and returning to Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, 700 days later was like running into an old friend with whom you have briefly lost touch. I was glad to be there, but it didn’t half feel unfamiliar.
The Masters in April was my first since 2019 and required another transatlantic crossing to my second important golf event in as many months. If in March I had wandered around the TPC Stadium Course at Sawgrass like a man let out of doors after a long time inside, in April at Augusta I strolled down to Amen Corner and ate my egg salad sandwiches with confidence. I felt immediately at home.
Last week’s PGA Championship was not like the Players or the Masters. Indeed, it was not like any major championship in recent memory, one of the most bizarre of the more than 150 I have attended. It was what I imagine it would be like to walk along a ceasefire line between two warring factions. To one side were the roaring cannons of the strategically aligned PGA Tour and the DP World Tour. To the other were the lucrative challenges to golf’s ecosystem presented by the LIV Golf Invitational Series and its spokesman and chief executive, Greg Norman.
Between the two was the reason we were all in Tulsa, which was to attend the 104th PGA Championship. It was like being in an art gallery with a Caravaggio painting to one side of you, a bucolic landscape by JMW Turner to the other and a portrait by Vincent van Gogh in the middle. Which do you look at first, second and longest?
Before Rory McIlroy shot 65 on Thursday for the lead and sent good judges such as Paul McGinley into a state of near giddiness, there had been an awful lot of jaw-jaw. A friend described it as being like a street scene in a Dickens novel, knots of people whispering to one another, peering over their shoulders in case they missed something – intrigue and mystery almost tangible in the air.
Strident voices were heard from former President Donald Trump (now there’s a surprise) supporting the LIV series and advising players to join the tour. According to Sports Business Journal, Sean Bratches, the impressive chief commercial officer of LIV Golf, resigned following – though not necessarily because of – Greg Norman’s clumsy comments at the Centurion Club the previous week. And in an article written by Michael Bamberger in the Fire Pit Collective, Jack Nicklaus revealed he had turned down an offer of more than $100 million to do the job that eventually went to Greg Norman.
As a McIlroy drive pierces the air, so two voices cut through all this babble. One was that of Seth Waugh, the chief executive officer of the PGA of America. I hold a soft spot for this nabob of the business world whose hair swirls adventurously around his head and who wears raffish white jeans and sometimes no socks at functions where many other attendees are shorn like sheep and have been dressed by that well-known tailor, Brooks Brothers. The son of an English teacher, a man who knows an intransitive verb from a gerund and a dangling participle from an Oxford comma, Waugh spoke articulately in favour of what he called golf’s status quo.
“We are big supporters of the ecosystem as it stands. We think the … league structure is somewhat flawed. We do think … bringing outside money into the game is going to change it forever if that happens. The tour is owned by the players and that means that everything ultimately flows back to the players, and as soon as you put any money into it, it’s going to create a need for a return, a need for exit and a lot of things that change the dynamics of it, which we don’t think is necessarily good for the ecosystem.”
The other voice echoing around Southern Hills, was that of Pádraig Harrington, the genial Irishman. I hold a soft spot for Harrington, too, for his intelligence, his loquacity and the fact that in Caroline, he has a wife who has never let him see a credit card, bank statement or write a cheque during their two decades of marriage. “Pádraig does the golf,” she says, and as a three-time major champion he has done that rather well.
The issue in this argument between the two tours and those behind the LIV Series, the issue that kept popping up wherever you looked at Southern Hills last week, is about the sanctity of the professional game at the highest level.
Thoughtful and articulate, if sometimes a little elliptical, Harrington is someone who often sees curves in a road that others see as straight. Somewhat surprisingly for the man who captained Europe’s team in last year’s Ryder Cup, he spoke out more favourably than most about the LIV Series. LIV are the Roman numerals for 54, which is the number of holes to be played in the proposed series.
“I can understand the European Tour when they turned down the Premier Golf League offer originally,” Harrington said. “They didn't want to rock the boat. But that boat is being rocked now, and there are pretty rough seas ahead. You have a rival tour to the PGA Tour, which the European Tour was, kind of. Ultimately the European Tour is the one getting squeezed. It’s going to go from being the second tour to maybe not.
“There is no doubt the moral side of it has been the low-hanging fruit that has been used to beat them back,” he said. “It’s not like my own country doesn’t do a lot of business in Saudi Arabia. As much as it’s being used as a stick to beat those guys – and it is a big issue for anyone who is going – clearly time will pass.”
It may be overlooked or not known that the DP World Tour is named after Dubai Ports World, a global supply-chain company that owns P&O, incidentally, as well as having management contracts to run ports around the world, including six in the U.S. DPW in turn does considerable business with Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil company that is the largest in its field and one of the world’s largest companies.
Any humane person would abhor Saudi Arabia’s record on human rights and what the kingdom did to an obstreperous Washington Post journalist, how it recently executed 81 citizens and its policy toward LGBTQ individuals. The issue in this argument between the two tours and those behind the LIV Series, the issue that kept popping up wherever you looked at Southern Hills last week, is about the sanctity of the professional game at the highest level.
It might help to try to answer this question: Would you oppose the concept of the LIV Series if it were advocated by a three-ball of Mother Teresa, Father Christmas and Dr Dolittle?
Top: And when it finally came to the golf, amidst the jaw-jaw, Rory McIlroy opened with 65.
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