Edition No. 56 | February 16, 2024

Hey,

On Tuesday I said that I was going to jot down some thoughts for the Friday newsletter about the state of LIV after having watched a few of its events this year, and I still am. But I realized in the process of doing this that my relationship with LIV might be a bit on the unhealthy side.

To be honest, LIV and I might need to see a counselor.

In some respects, I thoroughly enjoy discussing something other than birdies and bogeys. LIV has been an intersection for greed, opportunity cost, logic and business vision — which is a much more interesting place to hang out than, say, talking about Round 2 of the 3M Open.

On the other hand, I could not be more exhausted as a golf fan.

I had lunch with somebody in the golf industry a few weeks ago. He’s removed from professional golf but follows it from afar. His disposition was, Idk man, I guess let me know when the majors start or if everyone merges back together but I’m just kind of tired of everything.

I suspect he’s not alone in that. It’s a place I have found myself at times, and you probably have, too. So begrudgingly (but also kinda interestingly?), here are some thoughts on the state of LIV and its relationship to both the pro game and the PGA Tour.

13 Thoughts on LIV

1. The biggest thing I have noticed through two LIV events this year is the gravity Rahm brings to the league. LIV almost seems to matter simply because of his presence. Perhaps this is an obvious thing as it is the opposite of what is true of the PGA Tour — the Tour matters less in his absence — but I have been surprised by the degree to which it has been true.

Rahm is a serious person in the prime of his career who doesn’t suffer fools or foolish endeavors. Because I know this to be true, the result is that he has almost single-handedly shifted the way I view LIV and maybe all of pro golf.

I suppose this is the entire point of signing him. But it hit me during Mayakoba a few weeks ago that if you are still referencing LIV as “an exhibition that means nothing” (a phrase I have probably said a time or two!) then you have to completely disregard both the current state of one of the three best players in the world as well as his trajectory. That’s a problem we haven’t really had to reckon with regarding anyone who has jumped over to LIV until now.

I knew Rahm carried weight. I didn’t know he carried this much weight.

2. I recently had a conversation with a friend (different from the above) who follows pro golf but mostly from afar until the majors hit, when he’ll get a bit more locked in. I would call him a very normal and regular golf fan. It’s more or less how I follow, say, baseball or the NBA. Anyway, I was trying to explain bits and pieces of what’s going on right now — which feels impossible unless you have a JD-MBA and six hours to spare — and the following idea hit me.

When leagues are fractured — take soccer for example — you have to have teams and places ground the entire thing. It doesn’t really matter what league Newcastle or Real Madrid are playing in because they have folks who are rooted to a specific place. They could be playing in the Premier League or the top Spanish league or the Champions League or the League Made in MBS’ Image. It doesn’t matter. Because those people are not rooting for a team and its players as much as they are identifying with a physical location.

This does not exist in golf (or any individual sport), and in the cord-cutting era, I remain unconvinced that your regular season can be fractured if you want the business to move up and to the right. It just doesn’t work. The inertia is too great to overcome this problem. To have any chance at all, you must create the clearest global hierarchy possible. You must give the viewer a chance at understanding what’s happening (shout out to the FedEx Cup points and Steve Sands’ white board) and why it matters in the broader context to pull people in because they are not tethered to anything else in individual sports.

3. I came across this quote from Brendan Steele the other day, which I found interesting.

“To the average golf fan, they don't understand how important the team thing is to the LIV players. They think that maybe it's a little forced or contrived or whatever and it's just not. So that's a big misconception already. And then our team is so team-focused. Phil is so team-focused on what can we do as a team to get better. What do you guys want out of this? How do you want to do things? Even down to the clothes and the hats and the shorts. He's including us in everything. He wants us to be a part of it, which is really cool.”

Sometimes it feels like players have been given talking points regarding the importance of the team aspect, but for the most part I think it’s genuine. And even more than thinking it’s genuine, I actually think it’s kind of cool.

Gary Woodland made a video with Dan Rapaport the other day. It’s good, and you should watch it. He talks about missing the locker room in basketball. How the Tour doesn’t have that. I’m not saying that’s what all of pro golf should become, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing that LIV has created it!

Plus, it makes my job and your fandom more interesting.

When Matt Wolff is sub-tweeting Brooks Koepka by talking about how welcoming his team has been, those are dynamics that just do not exist elsewhere, and I am very much into them.

LIV presents them in a sometimes convoluted way, but partly because of LIV, I have legitimately been convinced that team golf is a good thing at the professional level.

4. I came across this quote from Phil Mickelson the other day, which I found amusing.

What an insane and wonderful golf character.

5. I watched the end of LIV Vegas, and I found myself yelling, “YOU DON’T HAVE TO PRETEND LIKE EVERYTHING IS THE GREATEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED” at the TV repeatedly. The breathlessness with which the broadcast praises itself, its players and its management detracts from my willingness to give the entire thing a chance.

At one point they tossed it down to Greg Norman on a microphone — this is at the very end of the tournament with DJ trying to close it out — and he’s talking about how rows deep fans are around the 18th.

JUST BE NORMAL!

Just let the thing be. If it’s good, it will be good. If it’s not, then it won’t. But you cannot make it better by saying it is better. That will only — I cannot emphasize this enough, only — make it worse.

6. The real boys club? There was a lot of talk last year about the U.S. Boys Club taking JT over Lucas Glover and Keegan Bradley and maybe not enough about the Europeans leaving off the Euro Tour player of the year.

The obvious response is: Who cares about Adrian Meronk? But this is not a point about LIV. It’s not even really a point about the European Ryder Cup team. It’s more about how much I do not want to hear about how the U.S. Boys Club is why it can’t win a road Ryder Cup, when the truth is that it’s the Euro Boys Club that is part of the reason it has won eight of 11.

(There is nothing I won’t turn into a point about JT should have been on that team).

7. A question I have had: How does LIV spend all that money and not have lasers on the courses? How does it not have insane SG data?

An answer I got: It does have lasers on the course capable of this kind of data. It just hasn’t used them yet. Which, honestly, that answer feels a little like, “No trust us DJ and Bryson and Phil are all in on the league … just wait,” which was mocked for a long time (by me, maybe most of all). And then … they were. Hopefully it’s the same with the data.

Related: I found this amusing. LIV kinda made it seem like it had partnered with Google to show every shot in the future, when the truth is it partnered with Google in the same way I’m going to partner with DeWalt this weekend when I have to buy a new tool for the yard …

8. This absolutely got me. I don’t know why. I think it was the wording of it. But just the idea of Jon Rahm being the richest human in history, richer than Buffett or the Vanderbilts or, like, Augustus Caesar just makes me cackle.

9. TV shows the final round of LIV Vegas ranked behind:

• St. John’s-Marquette CBB

• TCU-Iowa State CBB

• Greatest Super Bowl Commercials

Not positive, but I’m guessing Shaka Smart hasn’t handed out $700 million in contracts.

Clearly nobody is seeking this stuff out.

On the same day LIV Vegas concluded, the third round of the Phoenix Open finished third with over 1.5M viewers (LIV had 20 percent of that). I guess my question about Phoenix is whether that’s an institutional rating or a real one?

Said another way: Is anyone seeking out the Phoenix Open to turn it on on a Saturday, or is it just on at clubhouses around the country and homes of grandparents while the grandkids are visiting?

What Paolo said below is absolutely true, but I’m not convinced that the Phoenix Open out-rated LIV Mayakoba among the small group of people who were seeking out great golf. Maybe it was. Maybe people care that much about Nick Taylor and Charley Hoffman and Phoenix history, but I think the ratings are less a reflection of interest and more a reflection of institutional momentum.

I have been surprised at how little the Tour’s ratings have dipped this year, but maybe I shouldn’t be. Maybe there are like 400 of us who are actually watching regular season golf, and the rest of the numbers are just baked into the habits of country club managers and bar owners across the country?

10. I absolutely love this take from Shane Ryan that there might not be any needle movers in golf. It’s an insane thing to think about that might actually be true, and it fits nicely with my institutional TV ratings theory above.

Again, I don’t know what the implications of this are other than TV ratings might not be the barometer all of this should be measured by, but just the suggestion of this idea is totally sick.

11. I asked the following question after LIV Mayakoba.

The answers seem to be mostly in one of three camps.

1. I did not watch it and I will never watch it. Phil sucks and blood money is blood money (which I kinda respect as a take!)

2. I watched it and [deep begrudging breath] it was pretty good.

3. LIV rules! Rory is a beta! Kalle Samooja is twice as good as Scheffler ever was!

I fell squarely into No. 2. This seems like a good time to raise my hand and admit that I was wrong about some of this. Not all of it — I think there’s still a goofiness and un-seriousness to it all that not everyone is acknowledging — but I genuinely did not think LIV could even get to to this point.

Then after the Phoenix Open/LIV Vegas weekend, I asked the following.

Commentary is mixed and interesting to read through. In a vacuum, though, I think it would be pretty difficult to say that the PGA Tour has had a better start to 2024 than LIV. What exactly has been better about it? My guy Clint Chelf pointed out that it works in the Tour’s favor that LIV has actually had amazing finishes and still nobody has watched, but I think that’s taking a short-term view of it.

Chris Kirk, Grayson Murray, Matthieu Pavon, Wyndham Clark and Nick Taylor?

That’s good if you’re running a league where the strength is parity, but you are not. You’re running a league where the strength is in its stars. Do I think it’s amazing that somebody like Pavon can play his way from the Alps Tour into all the majors? I do. But you need those stories as a complement, not the main event. LIV, to me, between Rahm’s gravity, its two winners (Niemann and DJ) and its great Mayakoba finish has pretty clearly had the better start to 2024.

12. If the leagues stay like they are, I would love for the majors to go back to inviting order of merit leaders from different tours. I think that’s a cool way to build a field for a major, there’s little risk that some sort of nepotism is going to get Greg Norman VIII into the 2154 Masters and you maintain the integrity of your tournament without giving too big of a blessing to any single tour.

13. I’m hopeful for a merger and a global tour. The more I think about it — the possibilities of team golf as an add-on to the individual golf (perhaps in separate events), the more excited I get. The PGL thrilled me from the beginning, and I think — given the right operators, system and unification — it would really be amazing for regular season golf. Two problems.

1. I don’t know that everyone at the PGA Tour is hopeful for it.

2. I don’t know that anyone at LIV is hopeful for it.

In fact, if you read between the lines, it really seems like both sides are maybe not.