LIV Golf changed the PGA Tour – but not for the better

For many golf fans, the rise of LIV Golf was a surprise. Even if the league ends here, and it may not, the damage that has already been done will take years to repair. The billions of fuel dollars the Saudis have pumped into the pro game through LIV, too good to be true or sustainable from the start, has finally yielded some opportunity among some of our golf heroes. The wider pro game is more successful.

Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Patrick Reed, Sergio Garcia, Jon Rahm and others break freely from the culture, the culture that created them. And why, $100 million here and $300 million there? Who would have thought that their loyalty could be bought at all? Didn’t they see that LIV Golf, which created this new hybrid model, is a far cry from the old tournament golf, the golf they were raised on? Didn’t they see that the founding principle of LIV Golf was borrowed from it A Dating Game?

We want you. We don’t want it.

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The players who left behind LIV, the stars and near stars of the PGA Tour, also lost their way. They have shrunk. They’ve allowed their bold leaders — commissioner Jay Monahan, Tiger Woods, investors from Strategic Sports Group and, most recently, CEO Brian Rolapp — to squander the very thing that made the tour so attractive in one way: guaranteed. nothing. Benefit, benefit, benefit. (I’m surprised Woods even accepted that exemption from life in any event — it doesn’t sound like old Tiger.) Earn the right to play in 2026 based on what you did in 2025, that’s golf. Earn the right to play on Saturday and Sunday based on what you did on Thursday and Friday. Yes. He worked forever.

On that basis, Joel Dahmen and Scottie Scheffler started each week tied. On that basis, every event was a new beginning, with some degree of meaning (even if it was very local) baked into the early hours of Thursday. The PGA Tour never needed a profit arm. Charity events, different every week, provided golf with all the fuel it needed. LIV Golf has attempted to turn championship golf into something it isn’t, a global spectacle, with 14 events in 10 countries this year. Just as all politics is local (Tip O’Neill), so is all fandom. Most of the fandom, anyway. The British Open is for the world. The Winter and Summer Games, the World Cup, are the same. It’s on your calendar and always has been.

LIV Golf played an indirect role in the sunset of the PGA Tour stops on your calendar in Hawaii. (The PGA Tour, as we know it today, has been remade in the image of LIV Golf, at least to some extent.) Shaking palms in winter, swinging golfers under them, trying to get the new year off to a good start. The locals put on a show, and the rest of us could watch or not. What’s not to love? Many contests will be released here, in the name of Rolapp scarcity model. Fewer tournaments with fewer players for more money. How nice is that. . . we? Or Joel Dahmen? Joel Dahmen is an American/PGA Tour golfer just like Justin Thomas.

American championship golf, from the beginnings of Ben Hogan nearly 100 years ago to the rapid rise of young Jordan Spieth a decade ago, represented the purest and most civilized form of hunting, capitalist, sport. A guy couldn’t (in tour parlance) “stay out” until he played his way out of the Tour. It was so. . . a man (before that word had its legs cut off). Nice one too.

It’s a good game a beloved and apt phrase that has been attached to soccer for 60 or 70 years now. The whole world is playing futbolbecause all you need is a ball (any ball) and a field (any field). That’s all. The way the ball and the players move on that field is really good. I wish we, the debt-paying members of the nation of golf enthusiasts around the world, came up with this phrase first. Because golf is a beautiful game, and, simple in theory, strangely difficult in practice, played on all kinds of courses. Every true golf fan knows what I’m talking about here.

That’s why we have honored the best golfers. They do what we did, but on a scale we can’t handle. Their golf shots were magic tricks. But they were choked again like dogs eating grass on the way to the bottom of the 72nd hole. In one four-day competition, the human experience can be revealed in all its richness, or close to all. At the big events – with the best fields in the most demanding courses – that was even more true. Exhibition golf cannot provide that. Last month’s Masters did.

Back in the day, before LIV, the money Tour players made was the money Tour players made, there in the form of agate for all of us to see. But there was never any particular opinion for us, other than a good summary of who was playing the best. Yes, the boys played for big bucks but also, and most importantly, beautiful and often historic trophies. These men you played the game. That’s all they do, and that’s enough. Jordan Spieth created an 18-hole score as Paul and John created four-minute songs. They played and played until this happened. . . thing. Song, by the Beatles. School, we played golf. Place on the leaderboard. Do you work? Work was something you did for . . . money. In Jordan and Co. money was just a product. It wasn’t the be-all and end-all. I grew up with Tom Watson. Growing up, he was a difficult and demanding person. He played golf the right way. I was surprised by it.

Our golf heroes played a tough game well. They played the game we dreamed of playing. That was and should be the glue of fan relations. In that context, those LIV teams – the Crushers and others – will always be a tough sell. Those TGL teams, rosters full of your favorite PGA Tour stars, are the same — an empty sideshow. Justin Rose goes down, spilling his guts in a (so far) futile attempt to win the second major, that’s a good game. Is Justin Rose on the TGL team? A special prize for anyone who can tell me who they are – and why they care.

Hogan, Palmer, Nicklaus, Watson, Tony Jacklin and Lee Trevino, Seve, Faldo, Norman, Tiger, young Jordan Spieth, thousands of others, played this beautiful game. If half the prize money they played for, would they do anything else? Of course not. They were like us. First and foremost, they were golfers.

I don’t blame Greg Norman for having a brilliant idea for a global golf tour, and enough confidence and passion to sell it, eventually, to Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the manager of Saudia Arabia’s largest sovereign wealth fund, the oddball Public Investment fund. (What’s so public about it?) The idea of ​​the world’s best golfers playing against each other every now and then sounds appealing. American golf fans will watch the British Open, because of its age and see these royal treeless courses. Japanese golf fans will be watching the Masters, thanks to the beauty of the Augusta National green and the tournament’s public cache. But those events are outside.

As for golfers, most are locals. They don’t search playing the world. The only way to get them to do it is to pay them and that’s not good or healthy or sustainable. The answer to golf’s future lies in its past. That is, professional golf, played around the world by the best players in the world. We can all get our tee times online. That is much better than the old system. Shortly after the PIF people made their statement about their withdrawal from LIV Golf, a friend of mine happened to send me a photo showing golfers on a dirty course. It’s a good game.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com