LIV it up!

It’s like fishing in a stocked pond. LIV Golf is the fisherman, and the PGA Tour is the pond. The question is how long will the fishing season be open and how many more fish will be caught before it closes? If the pond is loaded with prize catches, and we know it is, we must also keep in mind that those fish have almost ZERO chance of not being caught. Why? Because those doing the fishing have gear so sophisticated, so hi-tech and so abundant, it’s like, well, to quote the great Roger Maltbie, “it’s just not a fair fight!”

If the PGA Tour is hoping that dedication and the moral high ground are sufficient to keep their fish in the pond, they are badly mistaken. Jon Rahm, the latest fish, was paid somewhere around 500 million bucks to get on the hook. No conscience, no dedication to the pure game of traditional competitive golf, will keep him on the PGA Tour. It’s called “show me the money” time in professional Golf. Like it or not (author not a fan) but it is here to stay. And unless some business-minded genius comes up with a more equitable way of balancing two very uneven sides of this equation, this is the new reality in professional golf. 

In standard bidding wars, the offers may vary in size, but they come from the same economic source- namely capitalism. Both parties are bidding on a commodity within the margins of their own budget; that is, how much can we pay and still get a hefty return for our investment. We can’t put up 100 million bucks if this player will only generate 50 million to our bottom line. Well, that standard is out the window in this current auction.

The Saudi Public Investment Fund or PIF vs. the PGA Tour might be like Mike Tyson fighting a welterweight. Saudi Arabia is a nation sitting on, by some estimates, 30 TRILLION dollars in the natural resource of OIL. What private equity is going to compete with that? We could put all of Wall Street together and they likely cannot compete on that scale! Also, their motives are completely different. The PGA Tour sponsors are concerned with advertising their product on the world stage, and the Saudis are concerned with whitewashing their abominable human rights record. There is nothing stopping them, and they seem hell-bent on this tactic. 

We really can’t blame the Players, other than their hypocrisy (“I do not play golf for the money”-Jon Rahm). If any of us were confronted with 500 million bucks to change our principles, we all might do the same. It takes a lot of moral courage to face up to that amount of seduction! It is, however, annoying to hear them say: “I have to consider what is best for my family” (like if I were single, I would be walking away from this 500 million…