Every trip to the keyboard is its own adventure, though I usually have a firmer sense of where I'm headed with a post. Today the blank screen seems to be mocking your humble blogger, so we'll see where this goes.
Blame Canada - Hey, it's not just me:
A win for the ‘Eh’-ges! Nick Taylor makes history at the Canadian Open
We do seem to love our "Eh" jokes, no?
Taylor, who shot a course-record 63 Saturday, followed it with a 66 Sunday capped by birdies on 17 and 18 in dramatic fashion to post 17 under and eventually force a playoff with Tommy Fleetwood.He matched Fleetwood’s birdie on the first playoff hole and after the stalemate continued to a fourth hole, Taylor drained a 73-foot eagle putt on the 18th green at Oakdale Golf and Country Club to break the Canadian winless drought at the RBC Canadian Open.The scene on the 18th green turned into a madhouse as fans stormed the green after the walk-off bomb. The aftermath was so hectic, security even tackled fellow-Canadian pro Adam Hadwin when he tried to shower the winner in champagne.
Despite my boycott, I walked into the kitchen where Employee No. 2 had the golf on just as Taylor hit that putt, which reminded me of why I watch the silly game in the first place.
But what saddens me most is that this delightful chaos threatens the feed lot of those controlling our game. They can't abide the loss of control that allows tour rabbits to have their moments, because of its predictable hit on ratings. But they're trying to create a Super-Tour, and we'll get into that below and in coming days, that will only allow for marquee match-ups, cutting against the grain of golf's DNA.
Nick Taylor was 69th in the world heading into this event (he's now 44th), and per Jay, Rory and Yasir, that makes him exactly the poster child they don't want in their big-money events next year, lest he harsh their mellow.
To be continued....
LIVing The Dream - Last week I noted that Jimmy Dunne's involvement in brokering this deal was strange indeed, the moral gymnastics alone being beyond my ability to comprehend. I had been reliably informed that we were to Never Forget, although that still allows for more room for maneuvering than I realized.
Dunne has spoken publicly, and it's a little scary and confusing. First, he tries to rationalize meeting with the bonecutters:
Dunne has been interviewed by a handful of media outlets the last few days, addressing the howand the why of the initial meeting. “I came to the table not being comfortable with criticism why [the PGA Tour] didn’t meet with them,” Dunne told the Associated Press. “If you look at what happened [with LIV], we never would have done anything they did. We never would have hired Greg Norman. We never would have him flying to an event in a parachute. We never would have done so many of these things.“What does that tell me? That I have no idea what they’re thinking,” Dunne said. “And when you have no idea what an adversary is thinking, I want to ask them, not their lawyers. I want to ask them directly.”
Yes, this is all about Norman and his parachute.... Geez, the Saudis aren't shy about telling us their view of the world.... For instance, flying those planes into the buildings I thought was a clear, concise statement that we seem to be ignoring...
But get this bit of moving the goalposts:
But then the next part of Dunne's response caught many off guard.“I am quite certain—and I have had conversations with a lot of very knowledgeable people—that the people I’m dealing with had nothing to do with it,” Dunne said. “If someone can find someone that unequivocally was involved with it, I’ll kill them myself. We don’t have to wait around.”
Ya got that? Unless a guy was on one of those planes, we'll use that pretzel logic to dismiss any concerns about turning the game of professional golf over to the Wahabis....
Dunne continued by saying: “We need to come together as a people. We have too much divisiveness. There’s a point in time when you have to say, ‘let’s try to get to know one another. Let’s try to understand, let’s try to demonstrate by example.’
What I understand, and I'm a tad sensitive on this subject, is that they want all Jews dead. Has Jimmy spoken with Max Homa or Daniel Berger about that.... And he just blathers on:
“I believe that we should not run away from our differences and we should get to know each other and basically make it difficult so that the extreme, vicious, immoral aspects of the people of the world, we don’t have to have a family deal with what we dealt with 20-plus years ago. As awful as it was for me, it was way worse for other people. I can’t imagine if one of my children were involved. I have a real empathy but I’d like to do something about it … that starts with communicating.”
Dunne then tries to put some concerns to bed, invoking what I'll call the Monahan Two-Step, which basically comprises the following:
- Tell the plebes what they want to hear, then;
- When confronted with pushback, hide behind the concept that it's still TBD.
He also noted: “By definition, as much as I liked the people I dealt with, the game of golf is too important, the legacy of the PGA Tour is too important. The people that we have in place have too much experience that we have no desire, no need—there is no way on God’s green earth that we’re going to give up control.”
I for one am greatly relieved to hear that, except for the niggling detail that you seem to be doing exactly that. Isn't this what George meant?
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984
If things are so rosy why do I feel compelled to continue quoting Orwell?
Other examples of the Two-Step? Here's Jay on the future of LIV:
While it remains to be seen what role, if any, LIV Golf will have in the new entity created by the PGA Tour, PIF and the DP World Tour, PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan told the media Tuesday that he doesn’t foresee LIV Golf events being run concurrently next season."I can't see that scenario, but I haven't gotten into the full evaluation, full empirical evaluation of LIV that I'm going to do to be able to comment on that. But I don't see that scenario, no,” Monahan said. “To me, any scenarios that you're thinking about that bridge between the PGA Tour and LIV would be longer term in nature.”When asked if he envisions LIV existing at all next season, Monahan replied, “We're in a framework agreement. We haven't concluded the definitive agreement. I have not had the opportunity that I'm going to have to conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation. I don't want to make any statements or make any predictions.” Monahan said there’s a commitment in place to make a “good-faith effort to look at team golf and the role it can play going forward.”
While Jay and Yasir were bonding on the golf course, don't we think a subject like this might have come up? Because they've agreed to form a for-profit entity that would essentially own the Tour, but couldn't be bothered talking about what they might do in that entity?
So, nothing is settled, except that elsewhere Dunne gets quite granular:
"The new [company] would grow, and the [current PGA Tour] players would get a piece of equity that would enhance and increase in value as time went on," Dunne said. "There would have to be some kind of formulaic decision on how to do that. It would be a process to determine what would be a fair mechanism that would be really beneficial to our players."
Except, of course it's not granular, because he's offering faux-equity in an entity that we don't know the operations of, but of course it'll grow, because....reasons.
Shall we see what the Tour Confidentialistas think of this all?
1. The golf world was turned upside down with the shocking news that the PGA Tour, DP World Tour and LIV Golf would merge their commercial operations and form one common ownership. We broke it all down in an emergency edition of Tour Confidential the day it happened — make sure to check that out here — but there are still a few lingering topics we have yet to cover. Here’s one: Is this the end of LIV Golf, and if so, how easy, or difficult, should it be for LIV players to return to the PGA Tour or DP World Tour?Josh Sens: My best guess is that LIV goes away in name, at least, along with those ridiculously named teams. The team concept will live on in some form, but it will be a small part of the big picture. The overarching structure will be a global golf circuit, with a select number of top-tier events for an elite crop of players, and a relegation system similar to that of the Premier League in soccer, through which the bottom guys drop out and new guys rise each year. As for ‘returning,’ I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. If this is a merger, and golf is now essentially one entity (no matter how the folks in charge want to spin it), those guys never really left. The top guys who joined LIV will have an easy time back. Instead of punishing the guys who ‘left,’ the new Tour, whatever it winds up being called, will more likely work to incentivize/compensate the guys who stayed.Sean Zak: I anticipate LIV having a bit of a runway still. Players signed contracts for four years, and this is merely year 2 of those deals. If they’re bought out, is it the same company (the merged operations LLC) that will suspend them? I actually think letting LIV play out its 2024 season could be smart. Give it yet another season to see if there’s any magic in the team concept, and reprove the value of visiting Australia. Heck, do two tournaments in Australia! That’ll all be great data points for the “empirical evaluation” that Monahan asserts will be conducted about LIV.James Colgan: I tend to lean on the side of LIV continuing to exist. No reason for Yasir Al-Rumayyan and the PIF to dump a few billion into a league only to trash it a few months later. It’ll definitely take on a new form, probably by taking a backseat to the Tour schedule. But I don’t know if I believe Jay Monahan has the power to unilaterally smight LIV from the earth just for kicks.Dylan Dethier: I dunno, man. [Copies and pastes for all other merger-related questions.] Do they even know? It feels as though they’re keeping all options open while they iron out the details. The only thing that seems certain is that LIV’s attempt to compete directly with Tour events won’t look the same next year.
Dylan, the thing is that, if they don't know, it's because they don't want to know..... and that's an even scarier thought.
With Peace in our Time™, where do the LIVste4rs play in 2024? It's either LIV or they have a clean path back to the Tour, each of which has profound issues. But the bigger issue is the Saudi's long-term objectives, which one assumes looks something like LIV, or at least falls into the super-league kind of context. Where does that leave Jay's PGA Tour? Yanno, the entity that he's sworn to protect and defend? Some kind of feeder tour, no?
3. A lot of players have criticized PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, saying he either misled them or didn’t communicate well enough. Meanwhile, Rory McIlroy said he felt like a “sacrificial lamb” with all the effort he put in publicly and behind the scenes supporting the PGA Tour. How much of a hit did Monahan’s reputation take with this, does it even matter, and is there anyone who should be more annoyed by last week’s events than McIlroy?
Me?
Zak: Monahan’s reputation took a massive hit. Perhaps the greatest hit a major sport commissioner has taken while no doubt retaining his job. Players are not inclined to trust him. The sympathetic pros will wait it out and see what his next move is. The priorities of Tour pros look like this:1. Money……….Everything else.Sure, part of that “everything else” is the hypocrisy involved in the deal and the hard questions they’ll surely face when their earnings officially come from the PIF of Saudi Arabia, but that’s down the line. For now, Jay can rescue this by delivering a massive amount of money and stability. (I’m afraid he just might do it, too.)Re: Rory, no one deserves to be more annoyed than him. I sympathize with him. I hope Tour pros commend him for what he did in the last year. I don’t know that they will.Sens: Monahan’s words and actions make him the definition of a hypocrite. But he’s hardly the first executive to compromise his personal reputation in the name of profit. Monahan’s first job was to look after his organization’s bottom line, and so he did that, knowing that he’d rightly be blasted for the two-facedness. Does it matter? I suspect Monahan will sleep just fine, and that public memory around this will be short. Bread and circus. Keeping the masses distracted with entertainment is an ancient practice. And it works.That said, I do suspect Monahan will be forced out of his job sooner than later. He spent a good many months blasting the Saudis. CEOs serve at the pleasure of the chairman of the board.Yasir Al-Rumayyan is now chairman of the board. Easy for the Saudis to replace Monahan with someone who has not been openly critical of the Saudi regime. So, that’s what I suspect: Monahan ousted, but with a pre-negotiated golden parachute to soften the landing.Should Rory be annoyed? Sure. But so should anyone who is exhausted by the way that money rules over character, time after time.Colgan: Monahan forever changed his legacy on Tuesday and probably for the worse, depending on your perspective on human rights. I think the 9/11 families have a fair claim to being more annoyed than McIlroy, considering the way the Tour exploited their very-real tragedy. At least Rory was a pawn and got paid.Dethier: Last summer, McIlroy worked hard as hell to get pros to buy in to his new vision for the PGA Tour. That sort of cohesion never happens on Tour, and it required a leap of faith from McIlroy and from the pros who followed him. This deal — and the fact that they were all left in the dark during its negotiation — made ’em all look dumb. I’m not sure if it would have been possible, given the clandestine nature of these meetings, but it feels like a heads-up and some discussion would have gone a long way on that front.
Dylan Dethier appears frequently here, an appealing young voice in our game. But this answer is just really off-base, because he seems to not understand that which Rory helped create. Rory did not get Tour membership on board, rather he supervised a coup by the elite players. Everything that has happened since the first we heard of LIV has furthered the chasm between the elite players and the rank-and-file.
From the $200 million PIP slush fund to the microscopic fields planned for Designated Events, every action has served to increase dramatically the portion of Tour revenues allocated to the top twenty or so players. The most interesting aspect of Jay's brief appearance in Toronto is that he didn't promise those players anything, for the simple reason that there's nothing in the Saudi deal for them. Jay knows it, the players know it and Jay knows that they know it, he's just banking on the fact that they can't do anything about.
4. What’s an overlooked element to this that no one seems to be talking about that we should?Zak: An overlooked element of this is that Jay Monahan doesn’t do a lot of media. He’s done four press conferences in the past year — the most turbulent in the sport’s history — two informal sessions with only on-site press (both when he was in a position to speak about non-LIV things), and a couple exclusive interviews. If anyone is going to have to answer the tough questions moving forward, will it be Jay? Will it be Jimmy Dunne? Does it have to be the top players, like McIlroy? Will Monahan put himself out there more frequently to set the record straight during these times of such little detail. All I’ll say is there’s a reason Greg Norman does basically no press conferences. There’s a reason Phil Mickelson gets his points across on Twitter dot com. The questions aren’t easy and when you don’t answer them definitively, they don’t go away. They linger.Sens: As the details of this deal take shape, what happens to the Champions Tour? The Korn Ferry Tour? What are the broader implications for lower-ranked golfers trying to move their way up? Will this open up more opportunities into the game? Or simply deepen the pockets and strengthen the standing of the guys who already have it made?
The Champions Tour? Seriously, Josh? Phil's already picking the events he wants to play in...
Colgan: Did the PGA Tour seriously NOT tell its TV partners — who pay them more than $800 million annually — that this was happening? The answer is yes, from sources I’ve spoken to. That is a … BIG deal. The Tour better hope the language in those contracts is ironclad, because they can’t afford to exist without that money and exposure.Dethier: It’s not necessarily overlooked, but it remains the essential question of the whole thing: Who’s actually in charge now?
Whose in charge is, indeed the question of the moment. I would suggest two filters through which to analyze that very question.
- Smoke and Mirrors - The deal seems carefully outlined for the specific purpose of allowing Jay and Jimmy to assert that they retain control, without detailing how that control might change over time. When someone blows smoke your way, you might want to know why they're obscuring the facts on the ground.
- Future Funding - We've decided to structure our professional golf ecosystem such that it can't survive without massive subsidies from an outside party, and they are working overtime to convince that these billions will continue flow in without consequences. To wit, that the Saudis will remain passive investors into the future.... Does that remotely conform to your experiences in life or your knowledge of the Saudis?
According to Jimmy Dunne, the Wall Street veteran and Tour board member who helped architect the arrangement, the Saudis have been granted only the right of first refusal on future investments and the chair of a new, for-profit joint venture, with no iron-clad promises beyond that. He said that Jay Monahan will oversee LIV and can disband it, despite Greg Norman, the CEO of the Saudi-funded circuit, telling his team that nothing changes. If so, Tuesday’s victory lap by LIV golfers was akin to frogs being tossed in boiling water and gloating about the warmth it provided.
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