On Tuesday I watched someone spin 17 heads in a row during a game of two-up. Seventeen!
As my son reported (he’s studying rocket science at university, so hopefully can be trusted), there’s roughly one chance in 130,000 of that happening.
It’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in amateur sport (assuming two-up is a sport).
Contrast that, with the manufactured circus at The Grange Golf Club in Adelaide last weekend.
Statistically, the odds of a professional golfer achieving a hole-in-one, as Chase Koepka did during LIV Golf’s extravaganza, actually aren’t anywhere near as remote as correctly picking 17 consecutive tosses of two coins. Nonetheless, one couldn’t have predicted the first ace in the short history of LIV Golf’s disruptive existence.
The chest-bumping and beer-soaked celebrations that played out in the immediate aftermath of Koepka’s ball dropping from view, constitutes the stuff of sports marketers’ dreams.
LIV Golf stars (l-r): Dustin Johnson, Cameron Smith, chief executive Greg Norman, Phil Mickelson and Sergio Garcia.
It’s the new normal, apparently: golfers assorted into random teams that fans are expected to have affection for; Phil Mickelson amping up to the subtlety of Eminem’s poetry amidst waves of beer-can storms; LIV commander-in-chief Greg Norman donning green ‘n’ gold LIV Speedos to hit a bucket of three-quarter 9-irons …
And is it just evolutionary or properly revolutionary, this omnipresent thunder-bass doof-doofing as the soundtrack to what was once the most reserved of sports?
LIV Golf isn’t a flash in the pan. Tempting as it is to do so, it would be simplistic to label it as golf’s WWE variant.
Would a single player among LIV’s cohort of 48 frontiersmen willingly remain assigned as a member of the RangeGoats team if they weren’t already tethered to their multi-million-dollar pledges of commitment? It’s hard to know but the players do seem to be enjoying themselves.
Huge crowds were on hand in Adelaide for LIV Golf’s first tournament on Australian soil.Credit: Getty
Which is of course tremendous, and good luck to them. But it’s also short-sighted, because if LIV isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, its four-dozen participants are custodians for the game now.
I can’t count how many times I’ve heard Norman say, over the past four decades, that nobody is bigger than the sport. Now, more than ever before, that’s the singular truth. LIV’s participants must together protect the game.
Now the dust of the first skirmishes of war has settled, LIV’s players and its chief must shoulder a collective responsibility to not wreck all that was good with the sport for so long. Because while it’s fantastic that players like Talor Gooch and Pat Perez can trouser millions for a weekend’s, professional golf is in a bit of a mess.
Earlier this month, the DP World Tour “won” a sports arbitration case against some of “its” former players, including Ian Poulter, although the outcome of the proceedings constitute not much more than a pyrrhic victory concerning the contractual fines the (former) European Tour can, legally, dish out.
Talor Gooch celebrates victory with a shoey. But will the LIV Golf hangover outlast the buzz?Credit: Getty
As a sideshow, Patrick Reed threatens to sue anyone who looks at him sideways. Such is the attitude of a litigation-happy multi-millionaire who’s never opened a legal textbook.
And then there are multiple sets of expensive court proceedings between the establishment PGA Tour against LIV Golf. LIV’s players are suing the PGA Tour on antitrust causes of action, which basically means that LIV says the PGA Tour operates as an anti-competitive cartel designed to squash any threat of competition.
The PGA Tour has whacked right back, pleading that LIV Golf wields antitrust laws as a cudgel, where in fact LIV is attempting to free-ride off the PGA Tour’s decades-long investments in golf instead of engaging in an honest effort to compete on its own merits.
LIV’s key players, including Cameron Smith and Dustin Johnson, still don’t earn world rankings points outside of participating in golf’s four majors; there’s no guarantee that Johnson (who won all his matches in 2021) or the European talisman Poulter will ever play the Ryder Cup again.
LIV tournaments in Australia, South Africa and Singapore won’t pay the bills, if the bills need paying.
On the PGA Tour’s and LIV Golf’s principal legal arguments, frankly it’s inevitable they’re both entirely correct in their pleaded cases. The parties will torch a quarter-of-a-billion duking it out and the legal bloodshed has the propensity to destroy the sport.
Once you peek behind the curtain for a bit, all of this is a shambles which can’t be allowed to rumble on indefinitely.
In the main proceedings between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour – commenced in the US District Court in the Northern District of California – the court’s docket shows there’s been 416 filings of pleadings, documents and motions by the parties. Thousands of pages, all created and filed since August 2022. LIV’s first pleading runs to more than a hundred pages of dense legal text.
This is a huge amount of material to file in a court in eight months. From my own examination of the court’s filings, the tasks of documentary discovery, depositions and pre-trial evidentiary procedures haven’t even started yet.
Credit: Illustration: Simon Letch
Presently, the final trial before the judge in the case is slated to maybe start in mid-2024. In reality, 2026 is a better guess.
The PGA Tour and LIV’s backers each have deep pockets and even longer arms.
Litigation between the PGA Tour and LIV will likely play out for the rest of this decade. But what damage will be done to the game in the meantime? The LIV Tour must become about much more than beer celebrations and rap music.
The danger now is that LIV’s backers grow tired of torching their money if the concept fails to take something close to a stranglehold in the US and European markets, where it struggles for relevance. Tournaments in Australia, South Africa and Singapore won’t pay the bills, if the bills need paying.
Dustin Johnson sprays champagne after his 4 Aces team won LIV Golf Adelaide.Credit: Getty
Alternatively, a solution must be struck. It happened in World Series Cricket in the late 1970s, rugby league’s Super League War of a quarter-century ago, and every single player lockout in the history of American professional sport. Presently, though, the hysteria of a week ago disguises the reality – that the actual sport of golf is being held as a hostage of fortune to the bodies that seek to dominate it.
Even if the PGA Tour and LIV do end up agreeing on terms where the respective tours co-exist and even interact to the point of flexibility in player movement, that might just create potential new problems of anti-competitiveness to third-party outsiders.
The vast majority court proceedings are settled between the parties. Fighting becomes too expensive in terms of the business interruption, unending and unyielding uncertainty, and the associated money bonfires.
All of this represents an intractable legal conundrum, with outcomes harder to predict than 17 throws of a coin. One only hopes the game survives it beyond the amber haze of the beer fog.
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