LONDON, ENGLAND | One Paternoster Lane is the headquarters of the International Dispute Resolution Centre, a five-storey office building clad in faux marble that stands roughly equidistant between the Anglican St Paul’s Cathedral, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in the late 17th century, and the Central Criminal Court, otherwise known as the Old Bailey, perhaps the most famous court in the world.
The entrance to the IDRC is dominated by two striking metal statues that look like ice cream cones; and opposite, on the corner of Ave Maria Lane, is that icon of modern society, a Vidal Sassoon hair salon. Paternoster Lane is peaceful enough to be able to hear the quarterly chimes of a nearby church clock.
The eyes of the golfing world will focus on this building this week, for it is here that the DP World Tour and LIV Golf have brought their dispute about LIV players’ right to compete on the DP World Tour to be heard and arbitrated by Sport Resolutions, an independent, not-for-profit dispute resolution service. This body claims to be the leading independent provider of sport-specific arbitration and mediation services. Counsel for both sides will lay out their cases in front of Judge Phillip Sycamore and four assistants. At 5 p.m. Friday, though possibly before, the session will end and the judge will adjourn to consider his verdict, which will be announced on the SR website. When that will be remains unknown. A condition of going through this arbitration process is that both sides accept the verdict.
A one-sentence and gross over-simplification guide to the case is this: The DP World Tour says that LIV players cannot compete on the tour; LIV Golf says they can. “It’s not DPWT players against LIV Golf players,” a DPWT official said. “It’s whether players who have left one organisation to go and play for another at the same time an event is being held on their original tour can expect to be able to rejoin their original tour. It’s about rules and regulations. The DPWT says those players are breaking the tour’s rules; LIV players believe they can challenge that ruling.”
At stake are matters such as Official World Golf Ranking points. LIV Golf players compete on a tour that is not currently recognised by the OWGR and thus the players are unable to acquire OWGR points. In turn this means their rankings will slide and their chances of competing in major championships and the Ryder Cup will shrink. For LIV players, the way into a European Ryder Cup team is to be picked by captain Luke Donald, and if there is no resolution to this dispute in sufficient time before the match in the autumn, he will hardly do that.
There is also the restraint-of-trade issue, which is a plank of LIV Golf’s antitrust lawsuit against the PGA Tour in the U.S. Experts seem divided between those who say that the LIV players are not suffering an inability to play because of LIV Golf’s 2023 schedule, which has 13 54-hole events for 48 players at which every player is guaranteed prize money, plus a 14th and final team tournament.
The other view centres on a piece of U.K. legislation called the Competition Act of 1998, one that prevents monopolies. “I am no fan of LIV and the way they behave nor am I a lawyer but I am a free marketeer,” said Ed Warner, formerly chairman of UK Athletics, the governing body for sport in the United Kingdom, and a leading sports administrator. “It seems to me that the two tours are inappropriate in trying to close down a threat to them by legal means. As a free marketeer, this sticks in my throat. They are trying to defend a duopoly, which will only be sustainable if the Saudi backers of LIV lose their appetite for the fight. … Let’s face it: The Saudis won’t run short of cash to pay their lawyers.”
The news from the U.S. that LIV Golf had fired its first two sets of lawyers in their dispute with the PGA Tour was considered a straw in the wind. “If you and I are involved in a court case and our lawyer did a good job, why would we change them?” said a DPWT official.
“What will happen (at One Paternoster Lane) is hard to forecast, in some ways harder than a legal case,” Warner said. “It may yet fall on the side of LIV.” There are those who quietly would like that because the best LIV players, such as Americans Phil Mickelson, Brooks Koepka and Dustin Johnson and Australian Cameron Smith, the Open champion, would enhance any DP World Tour field.
“Their tour is meaningless. ... We have got two completely different tours here. One we play for tournaments and national championships. And the LIV Tour is, what? Fifty-four holes and no cut, shotgun start. Sounds crazy.”
NICK FALDO
Last week the mood at Wentworth, headquarters of the DPWT where a handful of employees and the legal experts have been working on this case for six months or more, was described by one official as: “Forward-looking. We have just had three fantastic tournaments in the Middle East. It is business as usual here.” Another said: “The mood is apprehensive but quietly confident.”
Meanwhile, two heavyweights of the game have weighed in. “Their tour is meaningless,” six-time major champion Nick Faldo said on SkySports. “It really is. It’s a closed shop. We have got two completely different tours here. One we play for tournaments and national championships. And the LIV Tour is, what? Fifty-four holes and no cut, shotgun start. Sounds crazy.
"The (LIV) European players should not be allowed to compete in the Ryder Cup,” Faldo said. “They’re done. It’s a rival tour. If you work for a company for 20 years and you then leave to go to a rival company, I can promise you your picture won’t still be on the wall. You’ve moved on. Fine. Off you go.
“And the other thing that is very noticeable is the players that have left. Obviously, they’re in their mid-40s, they’ve been out on tour, they’ve been battling away and they probably know they can’t win out here against these youngsters. So, they’re taking the easy option to go over and try and win a boatload of cash.
“They made that decision, and I’m sure they knew it was going to cost them. They were playing the math game. They were getting huge chunk of money up front, and they knew it was going to lose them sponsors but they thought, ‘I can still win.’ ”
Mickelson who made an active return to social media last week during the Asian Tour’s PIF Saudi International, was typically upbeat. “I expect that the players, the LIV players, will win their case in the UK, and we’ll open the doors for all players to play on the European Tour,” he said. “There’s a very good chance that you’ll have more showdowns, more head-to-head competitions like you saw last week in Dubai, and I think that would be a really good thing for the game.”
Who will be the arbiter in this dispute? Why, the arbitrator or course.
E-MAIL JOHN
Top: The entrance to the International Dispute Resolution Centre
John Hopkins, GGP