Friday, March 1, 2024

Late-Week Leftovers - Return Of The Prodigal Son Edition

Just a few bits for you this morning.  But, before getting to the news, here's a quick scene from the Wasatch Range:

Photo: Lee Rouman

We've always been blessed with moose sightings at the Ski Resort Formerly Known as The Canyons, but it's even better since Vail built a new lift called Over and Out, which spans a ridgeline and greatly shortens our trip home.  The final hillock has become Moose Central, and ski buddy Lee caught this guy on our Wednesday transit.

No matter the quality of the ski day the precedes it, seeing these guys always makes my day.

AK, The Resurrection -  He's the Yeti, The Golem and The Loch Ness Monster all in one package.... of course, the Yeti never had to keep a scorecard, so we'll see how it all goes.

So, how does it begin?

Kinda weird that it starts with a "The road begins" before the segue to redemption....

To be fair, it actually began with a trial balloon hinting that a PGA Tour return was under consideration, which never made much sense to this observer.  While AK obviously was uniquely situated, given the insurance proceeds at risk, LIV was the obvious soft-landing of choice:

There’s still so much we don’t know. But here’s what we do know: Kim signed a deal with LIV
Golf that has secured him one of the league’s two “wild-card” spots in each of the league’s 10 remaining regular-season events in 2024. Kim’s lone-wolf status means he will not be on a team, but if he plays well enough, he could find stablemates next season. Just as TV shows need to prove their merit and watchability, Kim will need to do the same in what is essentially a pilot season. LIV executives believe the brashness and aggressive play for which Kim was known aligns with the league’s ethos. “When I think of Anthony Kim,” LIV CEO Greg Norman said in a press release announcing Kim’s signing, “I can’t imagine a more perfect fit for what we’re trying to do.”

Sure.... He's twelve years past his sell-by date, so I totally see the perfect fit... 

But it all feels a bit off somehow:

If you’re a Kim diehard or merely have just been intrigued by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his disappearance, you might have long fantasized about this day and maybe even envisioned how an AK reemergence might look and feel: a buzzy private-jet arrival on a local airstrip, entourage in tow; Kim bursting into a packed-house press conference like the Kool-Aid Man through a brick wall; rapt reporters absorbing riveting details from our protagonist about how he has spent the better part of his 30s. Yes, we’re exaggerating here, but for a guy who lived large, AK’s reintroduction has been surprisingly low key — and, in all its crypticness, a bit weird, too.

Crypticness?  Creepiness?  Whatev....

Kim will begin his revival Friday at LIV’s Saudi Arabia event. The first round at Royal Greens Golf Club, in Jeddah, starts at 11:15 a.m. local time, which means if you’re an American fan on the East Coast and want to see Kim’s opening blast (in the shotgun start, he’ll be going off the par-5 home hole alongside major winners Cameron Smith and Graeme McDowell), you’ll need to flip on the CW app at 3:15 a.m.

That Kim’s comeback party is unfolding half a world away from American golf fans is, of course, contributing to its subdued nature. So, too, is the dearth of American media on site, and perhaps this is precisely how Kim and LIV drew it up. A LIV representative told me Wednesday that no U.S.-based reporters are at Royal Greens this week, which, in part, helps explain how in two team press conferences Wednesday — one of which included McDowell — Kim’s name wasn’t mentioned. Not a single question about the splashiest LIV story line since the league inked Jon Rahm.

 I was shocked there was no letterman jacket.... is it too warm in Jeddah?

But these guys don't seem to get the ABC's of PR, do they?

Even Kim didn’t field any queries about Kim. That’s because he didn’t have a press conference, and won’t; at least he has none scheduled before play begins. One might think LIV would be eager to get its newest, shiniest recruit in front of cameras and microphones, but either Kim or LIV, or both, is instead electing to slow-play his assimilation. When I asked about when the league intends to bring Kim to a podium, the LIV rep told me, “We will when the time is right.”

Well, when you have those kind of boffo ratings, you can dribble out all your PR successes....

That’s similar messaging to what Kim himself delivered in a short video LIV published to its social channels Wednesday. In that video, Kim is playing a Royal Greens hole in shorts, an untucked white t-shirt emblazoned with “GIRL DAD” (he has a toddler daughter, Georgia) and a white LIV hat with a ponytail popping out of the back. “I’ll tell my story when it’s the right time, but right now I’m focused on golf,” he says. Toward the end of the video, Kim adds, “I’m 38 now so I don’t know quite a few of the guys, but I’m here to bust everyone’s ass.”

Whatever he thinks that means, though your unenlightened blogger thought he was there to play golf.  

So, where will this get AK and LIV?  I neglected to include this Alan Shipnuck tweet from my prior post on the topic:

Three at most, but I'm unclear in what sense that's unfair?  He'd have all the time in the world had he tried to return to the PGA Tour, but that would have entailed a grind to get back into relevance.  He took the easy way out, so there is a resulting need to deliver....

Another take on the same issue:

All that posturing, though, will quickly become moot if Kim isn’t competitive. The single biggest
question on fans’ minds is how will he play? Does he still have it, or even any semblance of it? After more than a decade in the wilderness, can he possibly challenge recent major winners like Rahm, Brooks Koepka and Cameron Smith? No matter how many money games Kim has been playing around Dallas and SoCal, it’s hard to fathom his game is sharp enough to hang with world beaters. The oddsmakers have set an over-under for Kim’s first round at 74.5; Royal Greens is a par-70. The over-under for his overall finish is 48.5 (out of 54). Line-setters are right far more often than they’re wrong. Kim will have this start plus one more (March 8-10 in Hong Kong) before his U.S. debut, which will come at Trump National Doral, in Miami, the week before the Masters.

Beyond the state of Kim’s game, another big question lurks, one which is harder to quantify: How much does the golf world still care about Anthony Kim? Do you care? If you’re of a certain age, you might not. Kim last played in a PGA Tour event in 2012 and last won in 2010. That was 14 years ago, meaning most golf fans under the age of 30 have at best hazy memories of Kim’s prime or, more likely, no memories at all. My neighbor, who is in his late 40s, is a rabid golf fan and weekly PGA Tour watcher. When the news first surfaced that Kim was plotting a return to pro golf, I texted him for his take. He replied, “I feel out of the loop that I don’t really remember Anthony Kim.”

I'd add one further question, to wit, how much does the golf world care about LIV?

 So, how's it goin?  Not a promising start, but obviously we shouldn't overreact to one swing:

That was actually in Thursday's Pro-Am so, shockingly, your humble blogger is willing to acceded to his request for a mulligan.... After all, golf is hard.

I loved that oddsmaker citation above, but I assume that, having dispensed with first tee jitters on Thursday, of course Friday would go better.... Right?


Professional golf is hard. Especially after taking 12 years off. Just ask Anthony Kim.

The 38-year-old returned to the golfing world this week at LIV Golf Jeddah, and it went about how you would expect it would after not playing in a competitive round for more than a decade.

Kim shot 6-over 76, dead last in the 54-player field at Royal Greens Golf and Country Club. He had seven bogeys, one birdie on the par-4 sixth and plenty of competitive rust to shake off.

Hope y'all took the over....  No one should ever take eighteen holes as a sufficient sample size, though the irony is that one round assumes greater importance when you're playing only three versus four.  He just needs to show that the talent is still there, even if his play is inconsistent.  One birdie on this easy a track doesn't meet even that low bar, so we'll see how the rest of his Saudi sojourn plays out.

How bad was a 76?  Pretty bad...

Kim’s round was the worst of the day by two shots (Bubba Watson shot 4-over 74). He was one of only eight players to shoot over par on the opening day of LIV Golf Jeddah.

Meanwhile, Adrian Meronk and Jon Rahm are tied on top of the leaderboard after opening 8-under 62s on Friday.

Hey, he's only fourteen shots off the lead..... 

But see if you can keep from laughing at this:

That's funny, but the spit-take is here:

Look no further than when he shanked his approach shot on the par-5 fifth hole. Later in the broadcast, Greg Norman said a drone flying overhead caused the mishit.

Yeah, a drone.  That's the ticket....

Other LIV News -  Can you feel the game growing?  So, big news on the media front for LIV, although quite the tell in the header:

LIV Golf lands a surprising new TV partner

That sounds promising, especially since the CW refuses to preempt Buffy reruns for Friday golf....   But what exactly is their definition of TV?

On Tuesday morning, LIV Golf announced an agreement with the U.S.-based streaming partner Caffeine to carry the league’s Friday tournament coverage through at least the rest of the year.

A real long-term commitments, plus where does that TV come in?

COFFEE GOLF

If the name “Caffeine TV” means nothing to you … well, you’re not alone. To the outside eye, it’s tempting to view Tuesday’s announcement as a half-measure of last year’s semi-disappointing weekend broadcast agreement with the CW. Just as last time, LIV touted months of “negotiations” with interested buyers before it wound up settling on an unheralded partner with little name value as a sports broadcasting entity. And just as last time, the league struck out with the creme de la creme of the sports TV world.

While LIV surely would have preferred a multi-year agreement with a glitzy sports streamer like Amazon or Apple, the Caffeine deal has a few things to like for the upstart league — even if it still leaves a few major questions unanswered.

I beg to differ....  It actually answers all the important questions, most notably that there is no demand to broadcast LIV tourneys, at least not where anyone might actually see them.

But talk about setting a low bar:

TGIF

At the simplest level, the Caffeine deal is important because it shores up LIV’s “Friday problem”:
The league has not had a TV rights partnership for its Friday tournament coverage since inception, meaning one-third of its tournaments have gone unsold from a media rights standpoint. In a sports landscape where leagues make the majority of their cash from TV rights deals, giving away Friday for free on the LIV Golf app and for a nominal subscription fee on YouTube just wasn’t financially sustainable.

The good news is that those days are now over. Even if the Caffeine deal nets pennies on the dollar for LIV, it’s still pennies more than the league had last year. (And the league could still sign a Friday linear TV partner.)

The bad news is that it’s not clear how much the Caffeine deal changes LIV’s perception. Landing any sort of agreement is good for optics, but considering the deal marks another failure to penetrate the billion-dollar budgets of legacy providers (and came two events into the new season), it still smells a bit like desperation.

Wow, that changes everything!  The golf tour so irrelevant that it can't find a Friday TV deal, still has no Friday TV deal.  Click through if you're so inclined, as James Colgan provides a deep dive into Caffeine, none of which actually seems remotely relevant to LIV.  Though his final bit will make you laugh:

Fully anecdotal: The tech seems relatively crisp and clean, but even after disabling my browser’s ad blocker on Tuesday morning, I was unable to pull up a working stream. (Maybe I’m just getting old.)

No worries, James.... After all, it's not like golf draws an older crowd.

Another storm cloud on the horizon.... Does anyone remember the Premiere Golf League?  

LIV Golf is involved in a potential eight-figure legal dispute over allegations it copied its format from the Premier Golf League, according to a report from The Times of London.

The PGL, a theoretical competitor to the PGA Tour and DP World Tour, traces its roots back to 2014, with details of the circuit becoming public in 2020 as principals began an attempt to lure the game’s best to participate. The league was headed by Andrew Gardiner, a British attorney and businessman, who pitched his vision to multiple outlets, including to Golf Digest. Gardiner’s vision was a tour with 54-hole tournaments and shotgun starts, with teams of four players simultaneously competing for individual and team prizes. The project was backed initially by Saudi Arabian’s financers.

“The planning is all done, the platform is built, the financial backing is in place,” Gardiner told Golf Digest in 2020. “Now, this will only happen with the support of the players, the sponsors and broadcasters, and the fans.”

Of course your humble blogger's mind envisions Yasir being forced to testify, though the Saudis will do as the Saudis do:

Though the PGL has attempted to continue, nothing of substance has come to fruition. Publicly, Gardiner has been relatively quiet on LIV. ​​“I’m not angry at all,” he once told Today’s Golfer. “We see [LIV] as a testament to us because it is, for all intent and purposes, the same format that we devised.” But according to the Times, the PGL has been engaged in a secret battle with LIV, likely around intellectual property.

So far, there is no filing in courts. That’s because, according to the Times, the PGL has instructed its lawyers to find a resolution to avoid arbitration. For its troubles, the PGL initially was seeking $60 million from the Saudi-backed circuit. The Times story goes on to say that possible settlement could be more in the neighborhood of $12.6 million.

Neighborhood?  That's an awfully specific round number....

Doesn't sound like much of a claim, unless the Saudis signed some kind of NDA or non-compete.  But couldn't happen to a nice bunch of fellows.

I know that's short by the standards of Unplayable Lies, but I do need to get to a few things before making turns.  Bear with me and we'll cover everything important, eventually.  

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