The Cornelius Vanderbilt Golf League

Edition No. 37 | October 11, 2023

Hey,

Congrats to Thomas Hill for winning our Holderness and Bourne giveaway. Even if you didn’t win — especially if you didn’t win — you should still check out their Ryder Cup collection. It’s spectacular.

This giveaway is representative of how we’re going to partner with brands in this newsletter.

We will selectively partner with companies that we love and give their stuff away to you. We’ll do that in fun and different ways that will hopefully be engaging and enjoyable for you, will help us grow in appropriate ways and will help those companies we partner with get their products out into the world.

More to come on that in the future.

Also, we’re entering the “Kyle needs to get in the lab and cook on Normal Sport 3 a bit” portion of the newsletter season. Howevah …

One thing I’ve been thinking about is whether, with the newsletter rolling now, you guys even want the book?

I’m genuinely interested in your feedback here so hit me with whatever thoughts you have.

Onto the news.

Normal Moment(s)

All very routine sports stuff.

1. 600 seconds

This was a new one for me. Never heard it before. Dylan Wu was tweeting about the difficulty of players who are fighting for PGA Tour cards this fall actually getting fall starts because those starts are purportedly predicated on last season’s (like 2022’s) performance. Which is strange.

Anyway — and this is the amazing part — he noted that the Shriners reduced its field by 12 spots because the tournament is happening a week later than it did last year and that means … 10 fewer minutes of sunlight per day.

Obviously having 10 fewer minutes of sunlight actually does affect a tournament’s ability to get golfers through 18 holes and necessitates cutting fields down, but that doesn’t make it any less outrageous or ridiculous.

Imagine the Buccaneers and Bears only being able to play with 9 guys on offense because of what time of day the game started! 😂 

2. 😕 

On Tuesday afternoon, I found myself in the extremely enviable position of publicly discussing how a war in the Middle East affects where Ben Griffin and Scott Stallings play golf in 2024 and beyond.

Earlier in the week, the PGA Tour released a statement in support of Israel. This was around the same time MBS — who is ultimately in charge of Yasir Al-Rumayyan, who is ultimately in charge of the PIF, which is currently in a 10-figure negotiation with the Tour — came out in support of Palestine.

And so we are now in a situation where the PGA Tour’s social media reaction (!!) to a war between Israel and Palestine has legitimate implications on the future of golf. If this is the case (and it very much is!), it begs the question so many of us have been asking all along…

Do we have any idea what in the world we’re getting into?

3. Korn

To answer the question Brentley proposed to me about which of these Korn Ferry graduates sounds the most made up, I would have to say that “brother of a teenage pop star who recently collaborated with Skrillex.”

That absolutely sounds like an answer in a game of Balderdash.

One Thing I Loved

Though I neither loved (nor hated) the OWGR’s decision to deny LIV points on Tuesday, I certainly love that it is being discussed by almost everyone in golf.

Why?

Well, the OWGR debate is almost purely a logical one, and I find debates rooted in logic — and not golf — to be the most interesting because they engender terrific takes and also tend to be a path to finding smart people to read and/or spar with.

I laid out my argument for why I believe the OWGR’s decision is reasonable and logically sound here, but the more I thought about it, the more the following question kept popping into my head: What even is the purpose of the OWGR?

According to its website, the mission of the OWGR is “to administer and publish, on a weekly basis, a transparent, credible, and accurate ranking based on the relative performances of players participating in male eligible golf tours worldwide.”

The word eligible is obviously doing some heavy lifting in that statement, and we’re going to come back to that word. But to reiterate the point I made on Twitter about why this decision by the OWGR is sensible, consider the following scenario.

Let’s say I discover that I am the long-lost great-great-great nephew of Cornelius Vanderbilt. All of a sudden, I am fabulously and annoyingly wealthy. What do I want to do with my newfound riches? Well, it certainly seems en vogue these days to start a golf league.

So I ask the top four players in the world to be in my league. They are so excited that someone who is not politically radioactive wants to give them ostentatious riches to hit a golf ball that they all agree to join.

So Scottie Scheffler, Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland all sign contracts to be paid $50M to compete in stroke play events 25-35 days a year (depending on how much time I spend on my mega-yacht). Because I work for CBS Sports, there is an agreement to televise these matches on CBS Sports HQ, and millions of people tune in.

I have no plans to expand or contract my league. I just want those four players to play against each other for as long as they want to. I schedule my league around the majors and the Ryder Cup, so they can go play those as well.

The OWGR obviously (OBVIOUSLY!) should award points to my league, right? I mean, we’re not talking about some of the best players in the world, we’re talking about the four undisputed best golfers on earth.

No, of course not.

Of course they should not award my league points. It would be ridiculous to compare my Mega Exclusive Golf League to, say, the European Tour or the Asian Tour. It would be silly for them to give me points because what is stopping me from signing myself up as a fifth player and finishing fifth in all my events and one day playing in the Masters because of my amazing achievements?

If we based OWGR points on field quality, 1. The Seminole Pro-Am would be the fifth best event in the world and 2. It would result in total anarchy with, as my colleague Rick Gehman pointed out, brands like TaylorMade and Callaway starting their own leagues to ensure their players a path to the majors.

Here’s the problem: I think most people think the OWGR exists to rank all the players in the world. I think the OWGR thinks (or thought) this is why the OWGR exists.

Ranking all the players in the world is actually not a very difficult task. Data Golf currently does it. Cam Smith is ranked 14th. Bryson DeChambeau is ranked 25th. It’s been my go-to when it comes to figuring out who’s playing the best golf because it’s basically just a big math problem. Again, this is not difficult.

But I don’t believe the OWGR — which is not an organization at all but rather an amalgamation of the most powerful entities in the game (ANGC, USGA, R&A and so on) — actually exist to rank all the players. It exists, in my opinion, to ensure that all tours are more or less equitable in structure.

This is a good goal. And in fact, if you look closely at its mission statement, this is kind of its stated goal. To determine male eligible golf tours worldwide. That portion of the statement — not the first part about ranking players (which it could have chosen to do!) — is what the OWGR leaned on when it was squeezed.

In the jagged world of professional golf — where you have tours in seemingly every country and region of the world — it is good to have some sort of uniformity across the board. The OWGR is less of a ranking of players and more of a governing body (made up of all the other governing bodies). It is a governing body that has incentivized various leagues to conform to uniformity by offering a theoretical path into the major championships.

What’s interesting here is that it seems as if the OWGR is being used as a shield of sorts. The people running the majors are the same people voting on the criteria for OWGR points. It’s easier politically for those entities to just vote LIV out than to allow them in and then change their major criteria later on (for example, by excluding OWGR as one of the qualifiers).

Of course this could (and maybe should!) go the other way, too. The Masters, for example, could just say that the top five on LIV’s money list are in the Masters. Major championship tournament criteria change almost every year, and this would not be crazy.

But then it goes back to … what is the point of the OWGR?

Imagine a world in which soccer games in the German league were 75 minutes. And games in the Italian league featured 13 players on each team. And games in Spain were only played barefoot.

It’s good to have governance, and the OWGR provides that governance across the globe for golf. The problem is that when people like me are suggesting that, you know, maybe the U.S. Open should invite the top five LIV players, then that means the OWGR’s incentives for leagues actually adhering to this governance are beginning to slip.

And I’m not sure what the solution for rectifying that actually is.

Question of the Week

This thread was quite fun to scroll through.

My answer probably changes depending on the season or time of year, but the one I think of most often right now is this Rahm one from The Open. He must be among the most meme-able athletes in history.

How is This App Free?

I forgot to post this tweet from Ryder Cup week. I’m not sure I’ve stopped thinking about it since I saw it, though. A goldmine.

Ludvig said that “a rules official in Jacksonville” told him at PGA Tour headquarters that he should apply for European Tour membership in case he was considered for the Ryder Cup and yeah, Twitter actually rules.

Oh buddy.

The Infirmary

This is perfect. No notes.

Love Your Work

I have been thinking a lot about this tweet (see below for part of it).

I am probably its intended audience. Perhaps you are not. But I consider our relationship to all the various modern content inputs quite often.

Books, articles, tweets, Instagram posts, texts, whats apps and the rest.

We are (obviously?) interacting with too much content and too rarely with everything else (people, nature et al.)

What is my responsibility in this? What is my culpability in this?

There are definitely newsletters, articles and tweets I think about more often than most of the books I have ever read.

And because of that, I think there is an equal and opposite argument against this take that I went back and read, which Ben Thompson of Stratechery wrote several years ago. It was a response to the hypothetical about why he would choose to not write a book.

[Stratechery] has been an incredible journey, especially intellectually: instead of writing with a final goal in mind — a manuscript that can be printed at scale — Stratechery has become in many respects a journal of my own attempts to understand technology specifically and the way in which it is changing every aspect of society broadly.

And, it turns, out, the business model is even better: instead of taking on the risk of writing a book with the hope of one-time payment from customers at the end, Stratechery subscribers fund that intellectual exploration directly and on an ongoing basis; all they ask is that I send them my journals of said exploration every day in email form.

To put it another way, at least in my experience, the lowly blog has fully disrupted the mighty book: the former was long thought to be an inferior alternative, or at best, a complementary piece for an author looking to drum up an audience; slowly but surely, though, the tools have gotten better.

I love that: A journal of my own attempts to understand … that I send them. That, in so many ways, is what this newsletter is as well.

All of this fascinates me. And while I am obsessed with books, I think the thing I’m actually obsessed with is book-level writing, which is simply a writer’s very best stuff. The “Pedro in the early 2000s when Fenway was swaying” stuff.

I don’t know if that’s what Thompson is able to produce 2-3 times a week at Stratechery. I don’t know if that’s what I’m able to produce twice a week here. But that is certainly a worthy and aspirational goal.