Voice over: Michael Robles
Writer: Jay Busbee
Video editor: Lance Keller
What’s good for Jon
Rahm is terrible for
the game of golf
Golf is rapidly headed in the direction of
tennis, in which only four events a year
matter to most fans
At its heart, golf is a simple game. Not easy, but simple:
Tee it up, swing away, and whoever reaches the pin in the
fewest strokes wins. Everyone is equal standing on the
first tee.
But simplicity and equality don’t fit in the worldview of
professional golf. Power and profitability rule the sport at
its highest levels, and if that means the game suffers …
too bad, so sad.
Jon Rahm
announced Thursday that he’s leaving the PGA
Tour for LIV Golf
, the Saudi-funded breakaway tour that’s
now taking huge chunks out of the Tour’s hide. There will
be gloating on the LIV side, wailing on the Tour side. LIV
will view Rahm as a conquering hero; the Tour will brand
him a money-hungry traitor.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. The truth is also
this: A great day for Rahm and LIV Golf is a terrible day for
golf fans.
Certainly, this is one of the most important days in Rahm’s
life. He has signed a deal that will guarantee his great-
great-grandchildren a comfortable existence. He has
managed to protect himself at a time when the entire sport
seems to be, if not crumbling, at the very least creaking on
its foundations. He looked out for himself, and he made
the judgment that throwing in with LIV was a better option
than riding with the PGA Tour. That’s a warning sign
glowing bright red in itself, one that surely has the Tour in
a head-for-the-bomb-shelters panic.
At 29 and in the prime of his career, Rahm stands as one
of the finest players in the world, a charismatic lumberjack
whose eloquence and emotion make him a better
ambassador for the game than a dozen of the anonymous,
country-club-raised types that populate the PGA Tour.
He’s the defending Masters champion, a U.S. Open
champion and a Ryder Cup icon.
Rahm has no need to worry about LIV’s inability to get
Official World Golf Ranking points for its tournaments; he
has a permanent exemption into the Masters, a 10-year
exemption into the U.S. Open and five years for the PGA
Championship and Open Championship. But every PGA
Tour event he misses, from The Players to the FedEx Cup
to an early-season tune-up, is that much worse off without
his presence.
If all of golf’s present talk of hundreds of
millions of dollars
, world ranking points, elevated
events and breakaway tours makes your eyes start to
glaze … well, that’s the heart of the problem. All the
entities involved here are clinging so fiercely to their own
fiefdoms and their own players — and spending ungodly
amounts of money to do so — that the sport risks
crumbling under the weight of its own greed and
desperation.
Golf is rapidly transforming into tennis, in which the only
events that break through into the national sporting
consciousness are the four Grand Slams: Wimbledon and
the U.S., Australian and French Opens. In the same vein,
the majors — The Masters, the U.S. Open, the PGA
Championship and the Open Championship — will be the
only times golf fans can see the best in the game gathered
together on the same course, the same leaderboard.
Golf’s current trajectory isn’t sustainable. The PGA Tour
doesn’t have the financial resources to compete with the
Saudi Public Investment Fund, and LIV Golf hasn’t yet
shown that it can attract the interest of more than a tiny
fraction of golf fans. The whole of golf is so much more
than the sum of its fractured parts, and LIV and the PGA
Tour are spinning in ever-tighter, ever-more-costly circles.
Maybe Rahm’s departure will spur a wave of new LIV
signees who bolster the breakaway tour’s presence.
Maybe this will inspire the Tour and LIV Golf to come
together, execute their agreement and find a way to allow
players to move back and forth between the tours, for the
good of the game and its fans.
Or maybe it will all collapse into two bickering, sniping
camps, each with its own array of social media shock
troops and zealots, with nothing achieved but acrimony
and nothing gained but billable hours. Golf is a niche sport
as it is; subdividing it still further risks shattering the sport’s
value entirely.
At its heart, golf is a simple game, one of the finest in the
world. But if the best aren’t sharing the same course,
there’s no true winner … and an entire sport full of losers.
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2 Comments
I do not care what happens to the PGA Tour. Perhaps if they'd have actually been paying out more than the top players, they wouldn't have players jumping ship. The only thing this will hurt is the pockets of the PGA. The average golfer out there could not care less that "the best" are not sharing the same course nor do they care about the format of the LIV tournaments. They want to watch golf and play golf. That's it.
interesting point about it turning into tennis.
a couple points: 1. LIV golfers are going to get worse. They will be competing against worse players in less competitive formats. Their skills have been forged in the fires of the greatest competitions with the highest skilled competitors. They've also competed for their $, rather than having it dumped, blood-soaked at their feet, just for signing. There are 3 LIV golfers who are in the upper echelon: Rahm, Cameron Smith, and Koepka. And those 3 will slowly fade. Let's see if they ever win a major again. 2. (a personal one) The most amazing thing to me is that everyone who has defected has bugged the living shit out of me for ages. The PGA had been purged of the grand standing, loud mouthed, cheating, ill-mannered, gimmick-oriented, etc., with the defections. All we had left to drive me nuts was the WHINER. The guy who, although he dealt with the same galleries as every other player, was the only one that pissed and moaned and swore at the fans on camera because he had made a bad shot. Surprise! he's gone too. The PGA and it's sponsors just need to scrape together more $. they have it.