AUCHTERARDER, SCOTLAND | A hotchpotch of horrors is the only way to describe the professional game of the moment. At the top of the list of things which took a turn for the worse during last week’s Senior Open here was the news about Henrik Stenson.
Namely, that he will have to forgo his role as captain of the 2023 European Ryder Cup side because he is joining LIV Golf. The Swede thinks he should be allowed to do both; the DP World Tour thinks not. Of course, the tour has been embarrassed and, as has been said elsewhere, isn’t that precisely what LIV wanted?
Setting aside the likely repercussions of the above, the seniors playing over the much-loved King’s Course at Gleneagles deemed it time for a few home truths, some of them more uncomfortable than others.
Gary Wolstenholme, the former world No. 1 amateur, set the ball rolling when he said that 95 percent of his colleagues on the Legends Tour agreed with his theory that the DP World Tour never should have thrown in its lot with the U.S. PGA Tour. “They should have aligned with the Asian Tour when they had the chance – and it’s something that could happen even now,” he said. “They could offer the PGA Tour back the $150 million or whatever they paid for Europe’s Sky Sports TV rights and add a further $50 million, if that’s what it would take to break free.”
In Wolstenholme’s eyes, the so-called strategic alliance between the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour has been a disappointment – and that includes the effect it has had on the Legends Tour. “At a recent meeting,” Wolstenholme said, “we were offered half a million (euros, or about $512,000, as a support package). We asked for €3 million and await a reply. I fear that our number of events for the season will not go beyond 15, and that eventually there could be none.”
Like Wolstenholme, Michael Campbell conducted his own survey at Gleneagles. The 2005 U.S. Open champion said he had approached a total of 10 players from the Open at the Senior Open, all of whom had been quoted as saying that they were traditionalists at heart and that they were appalled at the extent to which LIV had divided their arena. “Nine out of the 10,” he said, “admitted to me that if they had been invited to join LIV Golf, they would have accepted.” This cheerful New Zealander had been asked to play in the Asian Tour’s International Series England event last month at Slaley Hall but claimed that he was “too far down the pecking order” to interest the LIV people.
Retief Goosen ... described PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan’s decision to ban LIV players from competing on his PGA Tour as “the worst thing any of the tours could have done.”
Thomas Levet, a runner-up in the 2002 Open at Muirfield, knows of players in the early stages of their professional lives who have written to LIV Golf to ask if they could join their tour. “They haven’t heard back so far,” Levet said, “but I understand why that’s what they want.”
The Frenchman dared to suggest that some of these would-be LIV players could have changed their minds about Phil Mickelson and are beginning to think that he has stirred things up for the better: “The younger ones, in particular, are attracted by the idea of getting some money up front and a bit of security with it. If, as applied to me when I turned professional, they come from poorer backgrounds, they know that they’re in for a financial struggle on the PGA and DP World tours if they don’t get off to a good start.”
Levet then described what happened to him in 1996, eight years after he had switched to the professional ranks. Though he had been winning French-based professional events, that particularly lean year left him with €1.5 in his account.
Because LIV Golf has introduced us to a world of millions and billions, I checked that he did not mean one-and-a-half million euros or maybe one-and-a-half thousand. “No,” he replied. “I mean one-point-five. I couldn’t even afford a washing machine.” Winning the ’98 Cannes Open, his first European Tour title, saved his career.
Retief Goosen, a two-time U.S. Open champion, described PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan’s decision to ban LIV players from competing on his PGA Tour as “the worst thing any of the tours could have done.” That said, this coolest of customers drew attention to what he saw as Monahan’s follow-on error. “Why,” he asked, “did he wait until the first batch of top players had gone to LIV to increase the prize money for next season by $60 million-plus? Had he done that before they disappeared, he might have enticed some of them to think that with the money going up from $8 million to $12 million per tournament, they would stay put.”
As it is, Goosen thinks that the sponsors are going to abandon ship as they discover that many of the expected key players are not likely to feature in their tournaments because they’ve gone to LIV Golf.
Plenty of players were no different from Goosen in refusing to believe what their tours were telling them about their anti-LIV stance being all about “the integrity of the game.” And still more did these players speak as one when they said that the governing bodies had to talk things through with the LIV people. Now.
Because LIV Golf will at some point want to cast aside members of its 48-strong tour for younger, better versions, its representatives surely will want to talk as much as the rest. The upstart circuit can hardly survive without input from the others.
What, you wonder, is wrong with Ernie Els’ suggestion that the LIV scene of shot-gun starts could slot happily into the off-season without interrupting too much else? After all, the old “silly season,” which once filled the winter months for the Americans and the Europeans and enabled top players such as Els, as he put it himself, “to bring out his wheelbarrow,” had much to recommend it. Apart from anything else, it was vastly more entertaining than the present surfeit of 72-hole stroke-play golf.
To set against all the unrest, there were some at Gleneagles who would not mind if their Legends Tour were to remain as it is.
Here, the best summation came from Barry Lane, an eight-time winner among the seniors and a former Ryder Cup man.
At the start of this ’22 season, he had said to his wife, Camilla: “If we get off to a good start, we’ll treat ourselves to staying at Gleneagles for the week of the Seniors.”
They did not get off to a good start, and that dream week in the five-star hostelry never happened. Lane, though, did not begin to have a problem with how things worked out: “If you could afford to live the five-star life for 365 days a year, what would amount to a treat?”
Top: Ernie Els believes the LIV Golf series could fit into golf's autumn "silly season."
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