Imagine the surprise Greg Norman and his Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf Investments group encountered last week when they discovered that they were being played by Phil Mickelson. Their proposed new league is not just about growing the game after all. Nor is it just about money or sportwashing.
The yet-to-be-disclosed new league is to be a vehicle for Mickelson to fundamentally change how the PGA Tour operates.
Mickelson, who claims to have been one of four players to author the blueprints for the purported new entity, is using LIV Golf to attempt to settle his grievances with the PGA Tour and its commissioner, Jay Monahan. He doesn’t even care if the new league succeeds, as long as he gets the PGA Tour to capitulate to his media rights demands.
Norman and the Saudis gave Mickelson the gift of leverage. Finally, he calculated, he can effect change on the PGA Tour.
Last week, after Mickelson comments about that leverage were made public, the top targets of the proposed Saudi league followed with statements saying they'd stay with the PGA Tour. Then Rory McIlroy called the Norman endeavor "dead in the water."
Mickelson overplayed his hand. It’s one thing to consider, at his age, a lucrative playing opportunity going forward. It’s a completely different thing to scheme to upend the organization that brought him fame and fortune, and to do it surreptitiously.
As one highly respected former tour player told me, he took a blowtorch to his own reputation.
With his real intentions clearly revealed, it appears that Mickelson crossed a line with many of his own lodge brothers. Last week at Riviera, young guns Jon Rahm and Collin Morikawa joined the likes of McIlroy, Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas in pledging “fealty,” as Rahm called it, to the PGA Tour. Thomas could barely hide his disgust, and the attitude of many of the players in Los Angeles was “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
Then, late Sunday afternoon, McIlroy added insult to injury. In assessing the Saudi situation generally, the Irishman took a moment to call Mickelson’s comments “naïve, selfish, egotistical, ignorant.” He wondered aloud how Mickelson had painted himself into this corner, and whether he'd be able to get himself out.
Thomas, Rahm and Morikawa are the players of the present and the future. Mickelson, at age 51, is yesterday’s news. Despite a breathtaking win at the 2021 PGA Championship, he is no longer regularly competitive on the PGA Tour. Monahan need not lose a lot of sleep about losing Mickelson to LIV, nor any of the other rumored players contemplating a new playing field, should it ever emerge. None of them are needle-movers, and they won’t be missed.
In stating his real intentions, Mickelson may well have kicked away any chance of becoming a future Ryder Cup captain. And he may also have killed any chance of a post-PGA Tour career soft landing in the 18th-hole TV tower ...
As grizzled veteran Pat Perez pointed out, there are a lot of guys just waiting for the opportunity to step up to the big stage. Players like Cameron Young, who most people had never heard of before he tied for runner-up at Riviera, in just his 12th tour appearance. The Korn Ferry Tour is loaded with hungry young players like Young, ready to take the place of those who chase Saudi petrodollars.
In stating his real intentions, Mickelson may well have kicked away any chance of becoming a future Ryder Cup captain. It's possible that he cost himself one or more or his corporate sponsorship deals. And he may also have killed any chance of a post-PGA Tour career soft landing in the 18th-hole TV tower for one of the networks that covers tour events.
And I wonder, where is it written that past champions are forever welcome at Augusta National Golf Club each April? Dustin Johnson may have wondered as well, prompting his announcement on Sunday.
Let’s be clear: Mickelson has been a great champion. Since winning a PGA Tour event as an amateur in 1991, he has amazed and delighted golf fans around the world. He has been generous beyond the call of duty and signed countless thousands of autographs for admiring fans.
Yes, he has always fancied himself as the smartest guy in the room, especially with the various corporate sponsors he has run through over the years. He often speaks without thinking, and he has sometimes relied on alternative facts in making his case. He has made a few bogeys off the course, but such is the human condition.
However, it’s a sad spectacle to watch one of the game’s great champions, a World Golf Hall of Fame member, turn against an organization that gave him the opportunity to make almost $100 million between the ropes and maybe two or three times more than that off the course. Gratitude – rather than Norman-like bitterness or vengeance – is what one would hope for.
Norman and the Saudi interests learned the hard way that, in business, Phil will always make his own interests paramount.
Top: Phil Mickelson and Greg Norman at the Saudi International
E-Mail Jim