Thursday was a historic day in the history of golf. LIV Golf inaugurated the milestone of its opening shotgun-start style event at the Centurion Club in London. After months of promising that we would not believe how good this torn league would be (which implied the opposite), the tournament came with a surprisingly exciting presentation that included ubiquitous, player and team information boards, a short five-hour day, and an idea of the team that was easy to understand and even easier to buy. Contrary to his slogan, you could blink and not miss much, but if you close your eyes for a nap, you can miss most of the show. One of the elements of the presentation that worked best was a countdown in the upper left corner of the screen that let viewers know how many holes were left during the day at any one time. Compared to the tedious PGA Tour laps, the sturdy nature of the first 18 holes of the LIV Golf was a shockingly positive feature. The golf itself was not great. Charl Schwartzel and Hennie du Plessis who put it at the top of the leaderboard was probably not what anyone in LIV Golf had in mind when the idea was conceived in recent years, but the context was surprisingly stable. I did not want that to be the case. I went through the day as pessimistic as anyone. Not because I’m competing for the regular season in favor of golf, but because the lack of a business model and the often spontaneous lead until Thursday did not bode well for a day of golf for banners. There is still a lot of disgust that needs to be imposed. Quality production does not erase the fact that the LIV Golf Championship is essentially an entity that washes away the reputation of a hostile government. Nor can it change the fact that the stars will be paid regardless of whether they shoot 65 or 95 at these events, thus removing one of the biggest features of golf: its meritocracy. And no form in the world can make up for the fact that the worst PGA Tour events are still more important than any of the LIV golf tournaments, which do not include relegation. The PGA Tour, by the way, is in real trouble. A mostly toothless letter on Thursday banning players who exchanged their PGA Tour cards with LIV Golf laces is emblematic of how little leverage or power the Tour currently has. When your annual income is $ 1.5 billion and the opposing league has a war chest about 400 times larger, there is no logistical change you can make to keep all your players. When your only solution is to show players how much money the other kids have and how much harder it is to exist and thrive on the PGA Tour than the most comfortable LIV golf tournament, then you build confidence in professional athletes that they will choose the legacy and the morals instead of wealth. Let me know how it goes. However, there is a way forward. The people of the Golf Premier League have been trying for years to create a product similar to the one the successor threw at the Centurion Club on Thursday, and in fact it seems to be the very design that the Saudis copied when they started this golf championship. LIV. The PGL encouraged, did not resent, what happened at the Centurion Club on Thursday. For the PGA Tour to avoid drastic action altogether – either alone or in partnership with PGL because, well, the legacy is what the guys (?) Play for – it would be an unacceptable place to take golf heads in a new era. If the PGA Tour believes that the status quo will be enough to repel the waves of money that the Saudis will continue to create, then Patrick Reed does not have enough clubs in his bag to get their heads out of the sand. What is becoming clearer is that what has happened in recent months, even this week, is representative of what the coming decades will be like. As much as I do not want it to be true, it will be. These two leagues may be the ones promoting supremacy, or there may be another 10 appearing, but the LIV presence further diminishes a professional game that has already had 23 OWGR-approved leagues around the world. This brings me to where I really want to be: the big winners on Thursday were not Greg Norman and the LIV Golf Championship, but rather USGA, R&A, PGA America and Augusta National. When the weight of the daily tour is broken and repeated over and over again, it makes the “golf post-season” – if we want to call it that – even more important. This raises the question at the forefront of professional golf at the moment, which is whether the official World Golf Ranking table (consisting of the PGA Tour as well as these major organizations) will extend OWGR points to LIV events. Golf. For the big leagues to accept it would be an admission that they no longer stand by the PGA Tour and let it get away with the Saudis. The denial would be an indictment of the legitimacy of the OWGR as a ranking system, as so many top players already play LIV. Because these organizations will not want to be sued by the LIV Golf for this, nor will they want to underestimate their own tournament grounds by excluding top players (many of whom will still choose to make money from significant participation, even under the threat of exclusion), I am convinced that large organizations will not deny LIV OWGR points. There is some sadness in this. I spoke with a PGA Tour player on Tuesday who said professional golf was changing forever this week. He is right about that, obviously, and it is frustrating to think that events taking place in places like the Riviera, Colonial and Bay Hill will not hold the same package in the future as they did in the past. However, the result is that major league golf is by far the best form of golf in the world, and these four weeks will be even more memorable than they already are. The regular season battle for golf superstars will continue for years to come and fans will act as collateral damage. This is both sad and inevitable. Fans will consume all this drama, and some of it may even be fun, but little by little the golf foundations of the regular season will erode. This will be annoying, but also I’m not sure it can stop. No one can stop the tide of finances, especially the kind of dirty finances they play here. The big weeks will be a breath of fresh air. They know it, too, and that is why they will probably not stand in the way of any regular season tour. If they do not move soon, then at some point the output will be too large to take over, and to date they have not moved. Maybe because they have no motivation to do so. I keep thinking about what PGA America CEO Seth Waugh told Kiawah last year: “I come from a world of turmoil. I think it’s inevitable – in fact I think it’s healthy. . “ The upset has been made. When the PGA Tour tried to rely on history as if it were a big tournament, history did not support it. Thursday’s successful LIV Golf debut suggests the Tour is in a long war. LIV is not going to fail, maybe because it thrives but maybe because it was never built to succeed. Waugh watched all this happen as an underdog and along with the other three big organizations, somewhat ironically, became the beneficiary of the biggest change this sport has seen in half a century. Golf has always been quite global and with the introduction of LIV it will probably become more and more in the future. The top 1000 OWGR players will be spread all over the Earth. It will be difficult to follow and wrap your arms. But then, four weeks a year, the golf world will gather at the Masters, the PGA Championship, the US Open and finally the Open Championship. Players who play will likely be able to afford slightly better travel conditions and may bring slightly larger escorts with them to these events. But for those four weeks, none of the extracurricular activities that have plagued golf in recent years will matter. The sport will be distilled in its purest form. Trying to get a ball in a hole with a stick in the most demanding, exciting courts in the world for a trophy that really matters. The money players make can buy a lot of things, but they can not buy the charm or buzz of these 16 days. There is only one way to experience this, and all the consequences will be there.
