PONTE VEDRA BEACH, FLORIDA | The Tour Suite is a hospitality unit, the length of two very long putts, positioned 25 feet above the right-hand side of the 18th fairway at the Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass. As Istanbul in Turkey is considered to be the junction of the Occident and the Orient, so the Tour Suite is a meeting place for the great and the good in golf, from Alaska to Australia and Zimbabwe to Zurich.
Drop a bomb on this suite during the Players and you would wipe out many of the game’s administrators, their wives, an occasional player and even, goodness gracious, some journalists. Hit a high fade from the fairway and you stand a chance of conking the commissioner as he watches his players pass by below.
In March each year, the Tour Suite is the place to take the temperature of the PGA Tour, and midweek last week the mercury was running high at the perceived current state of the dispute between the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, who are the defenders of the game, and LIV Golf, the game’s disrupters whose frontman is Greg Norman. It has been described in these columns as an uncivil war in a civil game.
In and around Florida last week there was a distinct feeling that recent significant changes to certain tournaments on the PGA Tour, as well as the leadership of players such as Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods, and the success of PGA Tour officials in explaining the changes for the players at TPC Sawgrass last Tuesday, had helped turn the tide against LIV Golf in general and stem the flight of top players to that organisation in particular.
“I think it (LIV Golf) is dying a natural death,” a highly-placed observer said. “At first I thought it would take three to five years and then they would have to give up. No business model of the sort they have has any hope of sustainability. But now it feels like it could be much shorter. They won’t give up right away. It’s game, set and match, but they won’t admit it for a while. They will play out this season because they have to, but it is dying a natural death.”
A source from within the strategic alliance between the PGA Tour and DP World Tour said: “Players on the PGA Tour and DP World Tour have freedom of speech and can play when they want, and those on the PGA Tour have a massive pension fund as well. LIV is a propaganda machine in which the players are contracted employees without pension rights and will only have equity if the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour are marginalised.”
At the meeting with the players, Monahan and his staff laid out the PGA Tour’s vision of the 2024 season, which featured 70 or 80 players competing in eight designated tournaments which will have a purse of $20 million-plus and no halfway cut. “Jay had run every possible scenario through a simulator, and as I heard and saw them I thought, Wow! Wow! Wow!” a prominent source said. “These were not just the suggestions of Justin Thomas and Rory. They (the changes) were done hand in hand with the players.”
Tournaments without a cut, which may sound as though they are a modern phenomenon, have in fact been present for decades. Tiger Woods’ streak of 142 consecutive cuts made included 31 events without one.
“The (PGA) Tour has found something that has brought the top players and the rest of the players together,” one of those able to eat, meet and greet in the Tour Suite said. “I have never seen the leading players so involved. During the pandemic, all the thinking was, What are we doing to make sure the game survives? Working that out has bred a feeling of quiet cooperation. Then LIV Golf came along, we’ve got a war in Europe and now, as a result there really is a spirit of ‘let’s work together.’ ”
“I am not going to sit here and lie,” McIlroy said last week. “I think the emergence of LIV or the emergence of a competitor to the PGA Tour has benefited everyone that plays elite professional golf. I think when you’ve been the biggest market in the world for the last 60 years, there is not a lot of incentive to innovate.
“This has caused a ton of innovation at the PGA Tour and what was, quote, an antiquated system is being revamped to try to mirror where we’re at in the world in the 21st century with the media landscape. … The PGA Tour isn’t just competing with LIV Golf or other sports. It’s competing with Instagram and TikTok and everything else that is trying to take eyeballs away from the PGA Tour as a product. … LIV coming along, it’s definitely had a massive impact on the game, but I think everyone who’s a professional golfer is going to benefit from it going forward.”
Jon Rahm made similar gracious remarks: “I mean, without a doubt, without LIV Golf this wouldn’t have happened … so … we should be thankful this threat has made the PGA Tour want to change things. I wish it hadn’t come to the PGA Tour being under fire from somebody else … but I guess that is what was needed. It is because of LIV Golf. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have seen any of this.”
Midweek, a man emerged from the Tour Suite with an exultant look on his face. He said he believed the PGA Tour had just beaten LIV Golf, 8 and 7, and that Greg Norman’s plan to change the face of the game for a second time in his career had been kicked out.
There were other signs too that the tide is running in favour of the PGA Tour, perhaps the most important being the recent ruling by a U.S. court that Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and LIV Golf’s financial backer, and chairman of Newcastle United football club in England, and other officials had to submit to being investigated by PGA Tour lawyers. “I can’t see them doing that,” a highly-placed observer said.
Midweek, a man emerged from the Tour Suite with an exultant look on his face. He said he believed the PGA Tour had just beaten LIV Golf, 8 and 7, and that Greg Norman’s plan to change the face of the game for a second time in his career had been kicked out. “It’s over,” he said firmly. That man wasn’t alone in his enthusiasm, but he surely was getting ahead of himself.
“They (the Saudis) were anxious for a seat at the table, to be able to get under the tree at Augusta, that sort of thing,” the source said. “I think the (PGA) Tour could give them a senior tour event, a team competition, something that enables them to save a little face and not return empty-handed to the Middle East. But that’s it. Anything more and it could be like letting the fox into the henhouse.”
Not yet settled is the arbitration issue between the DP World Tour and LIV Golf that took place in a weeklong hearing in London last month. Judge Phillip Sycamore is expected to deliver his verdict in a few weeks, and both sides are bound by it as part of the arbitration process. If Sycamore rules in favour of the DP World Tour, which has allowed LIV players to compete in the interim, then that will be a further blow to LIV Golf. But if he doesn’t? If he rules in favour of LIV Golf, what then? It may be clear how that would affect the DP World Tour, but what would be its effect on the PGA Tour, which has banned LIV players, and its strategic alliance with the DP World Tour?
In short, only a bold or rash man would say the aforementioned civil war is over. A more judicious view is that a battle has been won, but not yet the war.
“There are only two men who matter as far as LIV Golf is concerned," another source said. "One is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, and the other is Yasir Al-Rumayyan. Who knows what they might do? They might want Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay so badly that he will offer each of them $400 million. We don’t know.”
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Top: Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy combine efforts to hasten the demise of LIV Golf.
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