Rory McIlroy is coming to Melbourne for the next two Australian Opens, re-balancing an Australian golf season which has been dominated by the superstar-heavy LIV tournament in Adelaide for the past three summers.
Another LIV event is planned for Adelaide, although uncertainty still surrounds LIV’s proposed merger with the US PGA Tour, which has been in a very long pipeline since it was announced in 2023.
The LIV-PGA schism is still tense, and this weekend’s USPGA Championship at Quail Hollow will revive the debate over whether the 54 players in the rebel tour, including Cam Smith – our Smithy, the 2022 Open champion – have declined since they went to the Saudi-backed league.
There was a logic to the criticism: LIV is played in a circus-tent atmosphere, there is no cut, so everyone gets paid, the tournaments only go for three days, and the annual schedule of just 14 events is cushy. Flying on Saudi private jets, bathing in tubs full of cash, risking nothing more than being doused with beer on a party hole – of course the LIV players’ games would go downhill, right?
Inconveniently for those pushing the argument, it’s not supported by the evidence. To the contrary: since LIV was established in 2022, its players have been over-represented on the leaderboards at the majors, the four weeks a year when they can compete with the rest of the golf world.
Not counting this weekend, in the nine major tournaments since the split, there have been 1191 entrants, of which 132, or 11.1 per cent, have been LIV players. (You’ll have to trust me on this. I’ve hand-counted them. You, on the other hand, have a life.)
LIV players have won two of those events: Brooks Koepka’s 2023 USPGA and Bryson DeChambeau’s 2024 US Open at Pinehurst. McIlroy’s implosion in the latter stole the headlines, but DeChambeau’s last three shots on the 72nd hole – a recovery from a tree root, a long bunker shot, a holed putt – were of Tiger-ish quality under maximum pressure.
Bryson DeChambeau during round one of the US PGA.Credit: Getty Images
In golf, wins aren’t much of a statistical measure. In the past decade, McIlroy’s win rate in majors is one in 41. Scottie Scheffler, world number one and utterly dominant for the past three years, has won two in majors. Tiger Woods won 17 per cent of the majors he entered, and Jack Nicklaus 11 per cent. Golf is a bastard of a game.
A more reliable measure is finishes in the top five, top 10 and top 20, and cuts made. Since 2022, LIV golfers have taken 24 per cent of top-five places, 19 per cent of top 10s, 18 per cent of top 20s, and 16 per cent of cuts made in the major tournaments. On each scale, they have outperformed their presence in the fields.
A month ago, McIlroy and Justin Rose, non-LIV golfers, fought out one of the tightest and most dramatic Masters play-offs. But just behind them were LIV’s Patrick Reed, DeChambeau, Tyrrell Hatton and Bubba Watson. It was an even more meritorious performance by the LIV golfers than it looked, given that several more would have been in the field had they not had their world rankings points stripped.
Cameron Smith on the ninth hole at Quail Hollow.Credit: AP
But what about our Smithy, who missed the cut at Augusta and has never been quite the same since, as Open champion, he took Greg Norman’s squillion-dollar bait? Didn’t commentator and former player Brandel Chamblee say that going to LIV had ruined Smith’s potential?
Leave aside the fact that if you believe anything Chamblee says about LIV, you’ll also believe a text message from Clive Palmer. The numbers, again, don’t support the argument. In the nine majors before Smith joined LIV, he had four top 10s, four other finishes, and one missed cut. In the nine majors since he joined LIV, he’s had three top 10s, four other finishes, and two missed cuts. As a LIV golfer, he came close to winning the 2023 US Open and the PGA, and wasn’t far behind Scheffler in the 2024 Masters. Funny way to blow his career.
The thing about golf is, nearly every elite player goes off the boil, often for extended periods. Australia’s Jason Day was also world number one and had four top-five finishes in majors leading up to his 2015 PGA Championship title.
His game then went into a slump, and only in the last couple of years has he been climbing out of it. No LIV to blame. Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas were world number ones with multiple major titles before their games went down the toilet. No LIV to blame there either. It happens. It’s golf. Only freaks like McIlroy and Scheffler, in the past decade, have avoided going down that gurgler.
‘Propagandists for both sides follow are obligated to lie. The numbers aren’t.’
This is a sporting argument, not a political or economic one. The politics of the Saudi regime are so repugnant and its leaders such pariahs that only America will do trillion-dollar deals with them, and it will take more than a golf league to sportswash Riyadh.
The Shark, let’s admit, comes across as a bit of a goose. Norman is such a laughing stock that Anthony Albanese has enlisted him as Australia’s special envoy to Washington for aluminium or something. LIV’s biggest advocate is the golf-obsessed US president, and the great deal-maker now has Woods dating one of his family members. He went to Saudi Arabia hoping to broker a compromise between LIV and the PGA.
But that’s politics. As a sporting insurgency, LIV started with a strategy to rob the PGA of all the big-name hotheads, wackos, villains and eccentrics it could buy. Plus, in Phil Mickelson, it got one of golf’s all-time top 10 who underwent a bizarre sort of midlife crisis in public view. LIV has poor television ratings, but ratings were never part of the business plan. The plan was to drain the PGA tour of personality, drag down its week-to-week ratings, and bring it to the table to ask its wealthier rival for a compromise. So far, that plan has worked.
McIlroy has been the PGA’s most outspoken defender, and its compromises with LIV have undermined him. By the time he comes to Australia in December, he might be a LIV player, if the scuttlebutt is true. Eventually, whether he defects to LIV or plays for a LIV-PGA collaboration, he will be competing for Saudi money. As in most big international sports, nobody ends up with clean hands.
The bonus for LIV is that it has proved its credibility as a sporting competition. You only need to watch it to see how seriously competitive the players are. The PGA tour now copies LIV’s model of having eight ‘signature tournaments’ year with small fields and no cuts. You don’t hear Chamblee or anyone saying this has blunted Scheffler’s or McIlroy’s competitive edge. The rivers of oil have not hurt LIV’s players, who, when given the chance to take on all-comers, have punched above their weight on the leaderboards. Propagandists for both sides follow are obligated to lie. The numbers aren’t.
