A Postette

 Can't go too deep, but this one needed a rebuttal:

Phil Was Right…Sort of

 The PGA Tour’s sweeping moves demand a reexamination of Mickelson’s legacy as an agent of change

So Alan, was the Kool-Aid grape or orange?

Of course, Monsieur Mickelson went about things in entirely the wrong way, which is typical of a complex, contradictory character who so often has been his own worst enemy. Now that his former place of business, the PGA Tour, has undergone a sweeping transformation in an effort to thwart the upstart competitor he championed, it is time to reassess Mickelson’s legacy as an agent of change.

This is the perfect compliment to Phil's passive-aggressive apology, it's just a failure to explain the complexity of his worldview.

We do star with a little common ground:

The tumultuous events of the past two weeks have provided some sweet vindication for Phil. As he laid out for me in a freighted phone call in November 2021, Mickelson has long believed that

PGA Tour players need to have more say in how they are governed. That is exactly what has transpired, as Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy have emerged as de facto co-commissioners. Cementing the players’ new muscle is the remaking of the Tour’s all-powerful board of directors, as it has been expanded from nine seats to 10, with the players being given a fifth representative; no longer are they outnumbered by bureaucrats and businessmen.

As Jon Rahm told me this week at the Tour Championship, “As players, we have been told [by Tour leadership] a million and a half times, You are the PGA Tour. And I think recently might be the first time I feel like they actually care about what players think.”

Do you know what organizations lose touch with their original purposes and ultimately serve the interests of their administrators?  Yeah, pretty much all of them...

Eamon Lynch had this on this very subject in a recent piece:

It’s been the mantra of every commissioner—admittedly there have only been four—that the PGA Tour is a member-led organization. That’s been nominally true, but only as much as players care to get involved. Most didn’t because they saw no compelling reason to distract themselves from the grind of competition, where their money was made. But when the game’s stars became a sought-after asset class, decisions had to be made. Some opted to cut and run for Saudi money, others to stay and fight—as much against the structure and complacency of their own Tour as against LIV.

Wednesday showed that the Tour’s biggest names have cemented their position atop the food chain.

What Eamon touches on is an issue that Alan seems to ignore, that the Tour has a wide range of members, and what we're seeing is a bit of a civil war between the elites and the masses.

Perhaps I've been slightly hasty, because Alan does acknowledge this issue briefly:

The mini-uprising led by Woods and McIlroy has forced changes to the schedule in an effort to get the best players competing against each other more often. This has also been a longtime Mickelson talking point: He is an outspoken critic of opposite-field events, believing they water down the Tour’s product, and as Brandel Chamblee told me about being paired with Phil at the B.C. Open in the 1990s, “Knowing that I was on the Player Advisory Council, he spent the whole time in my ear saying the PGA Tour should be reduced to only the top 30 players—nothing but the stars. He was totally oblivious to the fact that would eliminate my job.”

Phil, given that you're not in the top 100, your terms are acceptable.  But Phil might be considered a man of the people by the fans, but he's all about talking care of No. 1 through 30.  How exactly he would imagine young talent arising is not clear, nor does it seem to be a priority.

Mickelson was seduced by LIV Golf’s fantastical money because he has long nursed the grievance that, as the second biggest star of the past quarter-century, he was vastly underpaid. (Whether he was compelled to take the Saudis’ money because of what he has since called a gambling addiction is a question that is explored in detail in my recently published biography.) In our phone conversation, Mickelson noted that his on-course earnings peaked in 2009 at $8.3 million, including the FedEx Cup bonus, a fraction of what top players earn in team sports.

Gee, Alan, I had been reliably informed that you were a journalist, but I stand corrected.  Pay no attention to those two massive elephants in the corner, to wit:

1. The analysis conveniently ignores that team sports athletes are unable to sell their uniforms to the highest bidder, so perhaps that revenue should be included? 
2. Have you, perhaps, looked at golf ratings versus NFL ratings?  

Sportico did an analysis a couple of years ago of the highest paid athletes, all inclusive basis, and by happenstance I was able to capture the top eleven in a screen grab:

When you say that Phil has been obviously underpaid, I think perhaps the Kool-Aid has gone to your head.  Everybody takes the assertion that Tiger and Phil are underpaid as fact, whereas it's just opinion.  I'm open to the argument, but they don't make a case for it, they just make assertions as if they're facts.

What particularly bothered Mickelson was his suspicion that the PGA Tour was not giving the players a fair share of the revenue. He cited the Tour had cash reserves of $800 million, an exaggerated number that hinted at the truth. Faced with the LIV threat, the Tour has suddenly opened the spigot of new TV money. The nebulous Player Impact Program was created out of thin air to funnel money to the top players, and in less than a year the pot has ballooned from paying 10 players $40 million to distributing a whopping $100 million among 20 players. (One of the Tour’s strongest differentiators was as a pure meritocracy versus LIV’s potentially corrupting guaranteed money, but the PIP now offers lavish compensation that is not tied to on-course performance.) Hasty increases in purses and additional bonus programs put another another $95 million in the pockets of PGA Tour players in 2022, and now the Tour has committed to a slate of a dozen mega-tournaments with $20 million purses, more than double what many of these events paid out this year. Asked on Wednesday where all this fresh money would come from, commissioner Jay Monahan said existing tournament sponsors will help defray the costs, but he also cited the primary source of this new largesse: “Reserves.” Phil was right.

How laugh-out-loud funny this bit is....  Phil wanted more money is the gist of it, no?

I don't think either Alan or Phil quite get that this is an admission against interest.  Jay maintain reserves in excess of what Phil thought necessary, that's your run-of-the mill disagreement.   Then Phil led an insurrection against the Tour, and Jay used his reserves to fight off the existential threat.  Sounds to me like the reserves were necessary, point, set, and match to Monahan.

He was also obsessed with how players could better monetize their their name-image-likeness, particularly through NFTs. Voíla, the PGA Tour announced this spring a program to peddle NFTs for its players, though details remain nebulous. (NFTs of LIV golfers are already for sale.) Mickelson railed against the Tour for charging him a $1 million licensing fee to compete in made-for-TV exhibitions, part of what he called a pattern of stifling the players’ ability to market themselves outside of the traditional confines. Now, in the new world order, the Tour is happily supplying its stars for a series of Monday night indoor team exhibitions, in a fledgling enterprise called TGL, which is owned by Woods and McIlroy.

These are new revenue sources that I'm still trying to understand, though I'm pretty sure that NFT's are your basic scam.  But let's also remember that the Tour was being accuse dof obnoxious greed and the like, so I'm sure Phil feels more comfortable with the Wahabis

But Alan actually breaks some news here, and I'm guessing that Phil will not look so great when a full accounting is aired:

It’s impossible to say how many of these changes would have come about without Mickelson’s brinkmanship, but he undoubtedly played a crucial role. Billions of new dollars will flow to the game’s best players in the next few years, but Mickelson is getting, at best, grudging acknowledgement. As McIlroy said this week, “As much as I probably don’t want to give Phil any sort of credit at all, yeah, there were certain points that he was trying to make. Some of these ideas, did they have merit? Of course they did.”

The lingering bitterness toward Mickelson—not just from players but also fans and other stakeholders in the game—is less about what he did than how he did it, particularly the sneakiness. He was conducting stealthy negotiations with Monahan while at the same time secretly helping the Saudis organize LIV. Acting as a double agent inevitably leaves both sides with the gnawing suspicion that the two-timer is only out for himself; in McIlroy’s formulation, it was “a renegade group trying to take some sort of power grab of the PGA Tour.” Rory and Tiger have taken the exact opposite tact of Mickelson’s self-serving approach. These new guardians of the Tour have solicited consensus and fostered solidarity, galvanizing the other players to work together for the greater good. (This approach inevitably benefits the individuals too.) McIlroy and Woods have been hailed for their leadership, and their standing in the game has only been further solidified.

Specifically, those negotiations with Monahan will, I suspect prove duplicitous and self-centered.  Why, because it's Phil.

Care for a dissenting voice?

Two-time winner James Hahn doesn’t claim to be disappointed with the changes coming to the

PGA Tour next season, but that doesn’t mean he is pleased with them either. As one of four player directors on the Tour’s nine-voting member Policy Board, he cast the lone dissenting vote. In a Golfweek exclusive, Hahn tells for the first time why he felt compelled to do so.

“Certain changes were made to combat the LIV Tour, not necessarily make our Tour any better,” he said in a phone interview on Saturday. “To prevent more players from leaving our Tour, we are ending up paying the top players in the world guaranteed money that has increased exponentially. Three years ago, we started implementing this new PIP program, which has grown to $100 million. It seems like the people who have the most influence of how much money is distributed to the top players in the world have a much stronger voice now than they’ve ever had. I understand the reasoning that the money is used to keep top players and without them, we have no Tour. My question to them is when is it enough? We’ve gone from $50 million to $100 million. When $100 million isn’t enough, will they ask for $200 million? How will that impact our business?”

Hahn noted that many of the same players who bashed LIV defectors as employees who no longer had the luxury to pick their schedule and privilege to play when they want to have essentially given up those very rights.

That's very much worth a read, as Hahn seems to understand better than most the battle between the haves and the have nots (what Eamon Lynch amusingly  referred to as the haves and the have yachts) 

Here's Alan's rousing coda:

It was only 15 months ago that Mickelson, at the age of 51, won the PGA Championship in the crowning moment of a legendary career. As he was enveloped in a delirious crush of fans on the final fairway of the Ocean Course, one of golf’s most enduringly popular players had never been more beloved. But behind the scenes, forces were already in motion that would forever cloud his legacy and turn him into a pariah on the tour that made him a star. Mickelson has earned a nine-figure bonanza from LIV and helped reshape the landscape of professional golf. But it is impossible not to wonder if, in his quiet moments, he still believes this fight was worth it.

When in front of a camera, he looks like he's sold his soul to the devil.... which is about as accurate as Phil gets.

My predictions have suffered from the same dispersion pattern as my driver, but the one thing that I got very right was that Phil's insurrection would push the Tour in a lamentable direction.  Contra Alan, that doesn't make Phil right about any of this.

Interestingly, no one, Alan included, wants any part of the larger issue of what does the world look like with the Saudi's running the largest golf tour on the planet?  Setting aside the obvious blood money issue, what happens when the checks stop coming?  It's actually a startlingly nihilistic view of the gold world, because he's more than eager to blow up a century of golf history to cash that check.  But who exactly gave him that authority?

I have to make tracks at this pint, but Alan seems awfully credulous as regards our Phil, perhaps his own financial interest have become intertwined, as that article obviously promotes his recently-issued biography.