Tommy Martin: Norman and Saudis going to war for the freedom to make greedy golfers richer
Great white bark: Greg Norman, CEO of Liv Golf Investments, has shown his teeth this week with fighting words for the PGA Tour.
The battle lines are drawn.
On one side, nestled in a sandy bunker, LIV Golf Investments. The breakaway tour that’s not a breakaway tour. The sportswashing project of a cruel, despotic regime that claims it just wants to grow the game of golf.
Across the fairway, the PGA Tour: bastion of country club conservatism, smug citadel of white privilege, corporate America at play.
Who are the good guys again?
The PGA Tour’s decision to refuse release requests for the inaugural LIV Golf Invitational Series event was a retaliatory strike after the Saudi-backed rival had parked its tanks on the Tour’s impeccably manicured greens.
The LIV event at the Centurion Golf Club outside London from June 9-11 is the first of eight such tournaments planned this year. Each boasts a $25 million purse, with $4 million for the winner, unprecedented riches even by professional golf’s lavish standards. Those playing in London would be snubbing the PGA Tour’s RBC Canadian Open, which offers a measly $8.7 million prize pot.
There are many reasons to go to war, but the right to give golfers more money must be the worst of them.
On the face of it, this is a territorial battle over prime commercial real estate – the worldwide interest in young men in slacks hitting little white balls. LIV claim they can make this better, funner, more lucrative for all concerned, especially the young men in slacks. The PGA Tour say things are fun and lucrative enough already and, excuse me, but this is private property. Security!
LIV’s money had reportedly attracted 19 of the world’s top 100 players for the Centurion event, including Phil Mickelson, Lee Westwood, Sergio Garcia and Ian Poulter, as well as former world number one Martin Kaymer. Hardly a stellar line-up and notably geriatric and Euro-centric. Men with less to lose with the PGA Tour mothership and, in the case of Mickelson, whose gambling debts were the subject of lurid headlines this week, much to gain.
Perhaps there is no fool like an old fool, or maybe the sight of Poults holding a cheque for $5 million would have started a stampede from the holdouts. Either way, the PGA Tour wants these guys to pick a side.
Enter LIV’s CEO Greg Norman: two-time major winner, multiple major bottler, the Great White Shark well named. “Sadly, the PGA Tour seems intent on denying professional golfers their right to play golf, unless it’s exclusively in a PGA Tour tournament," Norman said, manning the barricades for the huddled masses of the locker room.
"But no matter what obstacles the PGA Tour puts in our way, we will not be stopped,” Norman’s statement concluded, things frankly turning a bit Emperor Palpatine.
This is all heading for the courts, of course. LIV reckon golfers’ ‘independent contractor’ status gives the PGA Tour no right to tell them where and when they can play. The PGA Tour believe that they are a club in which members must abide by the rules. And golfers love clubs and rules.
But boiling all this down to some sort of employment law shemozzle is a red herring. Even if it appeals to the nakedly corporate milieu in which golf exists, this is not about the freedom of capital to shape the world to its will, like a glacier carving out the prehistoric landscape.
And what a glacier, by the way. Prior to the PGA Tour’s clampdown, Norman informed us that his Saudi overlords had handed him an additional $2 billion war chest to continue their altruistic bid to “give players options that promote the great game of golf globally.”
Positioning the Saudis as champions of freedoms of any kind is a stretch, but here we are. In truth LIV Golf Investments is acting no more as the invisible hand of the free market than Vladimir Putin is promoting the cause of world peace. There is no commercial logic to any of their plans. In contrast, this is just another example of the Saudis wielding the cudgel of their infinite wealth in their own geopolitical interests.
No different to Newcastle United, whose sale was ushered in by the mealy-mouthed platitudes of willing stooges, LIV has found its cash quite persuasive. Lee Westwood trumpeted the usual talking points about every other sport dipping its nose in the oil-funded trough and how the Saudis wanted to use sport to bring about change (as opposed to using bombs, as they are doing in Yemen, or bonesaws, as in the case of the murdered dissident Jamal Khashoggi).
Norman, meanwhile, claimed not to be answerable to Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman, suggesting LIV was its own, thrusting, independent entity, echoing the nonsense that accompanied Newcastle’s sale to the Saudis.
But there are moments of clarity through the fog of war. Take Mickelson’s infamous comments about the Saudis being “scary motherfuckers” whose largesse he was using to leverage more cash out of the PGA Tour. The Saudis are betting on there being enough golfers out there as greedy as Mickelson. And the fact that they executed 81 people in one day shortly after Mickelson’s comments became public suggests they don’t expect the scariness to be a dealbreaker.
For their part, the PGA Tour is banking on stature and tradition and perhaps the sensible notion that watching golfers get rich is not what makes people tune in on a Sunday evening. The prestige of the four majors and a handful of other tournaments are what float the boats of most fans and, in truth, most of the young men in slacks too.
Still, it would help if all concerned shared the view of Rory McIlroy, when asked whether his ilk were under-rewarded for their efforts: “I play golf for a living. Like, there's, y'know, nurses and teachers and they're the ones that should be getting paid a lot more…I realise how fortunate I am and anyone that says otherwise needs their head examined."
He is right, of course. But then isn’t truth the first casualty of war?
