Weekend Wrap - OWGR/LIV Update Edition

I'm terribly late to the keyboard due to a 15 lb. feline making its home in my lap for most of the early morning hours, circulation to my legs obviously being a low priority to him.  So, you can grab your Lexi news on your own, but what of the larger issues in our game.  Or at least those that can be covered in 45 minutes...

OWGR Musings - We'll lede with the Tour Confidential panel's take on that OWGR decision:

After 16 months of deliberation, LIV Golf has been denied World Ranking points, with the OWGR board essentially saying the biggest strike against LIV was its lack of guaranteed promotion and relegation of players. Are you surprised? And was this the right move?

Berhow: Not totally surprised, because it sounded like this was the likely outcome for a while now. What gets me is that LIV Golf wanted its format to be different, yes, but if we are going back to the early days, I’d want to make sure my start-up league would be doing everything it could to make it incredibly easy to be included in the system. Instead it seemed like LIV did what it wanted and was expecting everyone else to conform. Apparently that tactic didn’t work.

Marksbury: Spot on, Josh. There was never any indication that this was going to work in LIV’s favor. But I did find it interesting that LIV has a bit of a roadmap to OWGR legitimacy now. Time will tell if they will make any changes — or if their players will even care that much.

Sens: PIF chair Yasir Al-Rumayyan played golf with the R&A’s Martin Slumbers and OWGR’s Peter Dawson at the Dunhill right before this decision came down, so none of this should come as a surprise to LIV. Or to anyone else. Dawson’s letter on the decision lays out a lot of the rationale (mainly, limited channels for players performing their way onto LIV or dropping off the circuit), all of which sounds defensible enough on the face of it. LIV’s failure to meet a number of the criteria gave the OWGR plausible ground to stand on. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine that all kinds of other political and economic considerations weren’t also at play, and that we aren’t being told the entire story. One of the many lessons of the past year-plus is that we shouldn’t count on golf’s major power brokers being entirely transparent with us.

Yeah, nothing too new there, but to note that the door wasn't slammed shut entirely.  The decision seems both justifiable on the merits, but also awkward given the context of ongoing negotiations.

Eamon Lynch has a characteristic take on the matter, which may not be all that much more enlightening, though will undoubtedly amuse you to a far greater extent:

Lynch: The ranking points row exposes what powers LIV Golf beyond Saudi cash — naked entitlement

Buckle yourself in:

LIV golfers are courageously forging an innovative new path for a stuffy old sport in the face of obstructionist conspiracies by golf’s corrupt deep state. Or so insists Phil Mickelson, whose prior

perilous proximity to an insider trading indictment at least grants him some authority on corrupt conspiracies.

The latest supposed evidence of anti-LIV collusion is the refusal by the Official World Golf Ranking to recognize the Saudi-funded circuit, and the reaction to that rejection exposes an argument by the league and its players that is less about rewarding their enlightenment than indulging their entitlement.

Phil seems quite sad these days:

The OWGR’s decision was neither surprising nor suspicious. LIV didn’t meet multiple criteria for inclusion when applied 15 months ago and has made no serious effort at compliance since. The chairman of the ranking body, Peter Dawson, said algorithmic solutions exist to questions about field size, number of rounds and the lack of a cut, but that there remain two areas of significant concern: the qualification process, and how LIV’s individual tournaments co-exist with the team component.

Entry to LIV is determined by the whim of Greg Norman and the checkbook of Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Exits from LIV are equally inequitable, with some stars contractually exempt from the consequences of poor play. “Simply put, the Board Committee does not believe it is equitable to thousands of players who strive every day to get starts in OWGR Eligible Tournaments to have a tour. operate in this mostly-closed fashion,” Dawson wrote to Norman. He further noted that LIV teammates are often grouped together and cited comments by Sebastian Munoz, who in April admitted that he was less concerned with tying Brooks Koepka on the final hole of an individual tournament than in protecting a narrow lead in the team event.

All of which one might have thought through before committing that $2 billion large, though larger geopolitical issues might also be involved.

None of this will surprise you, but it is amusing when we're reminded of how smart these folks pretend to be:

Warming to the goal of gaslighting, LIV’s statement continued: “A ranking which fails to fairly represent all participants, irrespective of where in the world they play golf, robs fans, players and all of golf’s stakeholders of the objective basis underpinning any accurate recognition of the world’s best player performances. It also robs some traditional tournaments of the best fields possible.”

This week alone, the OWGR will rank competitors in the United States, Spain, Macau, Japan, South Korea, Australia, China, South Africa, Sweden and Indonesia. It meets any reasonable standard for “irrespective of where in the world,” even as it excludes Saudi Arabia. This isn’t a dispute about individuals or geography but about format. It’s not who or where, but how. As for robbing events of the best fields, the majors have always been free to adjust exemption criteria to accommodate LIV players, though none is likely to embrace Bryson DeChambeau’s fatuous idea of automatically exempting the league’s top twelve members — 25% of the entire roster.

Yes, LIV is all about the golf fan, notwithstanding their attempts to destroy that which golf fans have held dear....

I won't too deep into Phil's fever dream Twitter thread, but apparentlyy the best is yet to come:

After the OWGR announcement, Phredo Mickelson swung by social media to peddle conspiracy theories so specious that one loses IQ points just by reading them, all while conveniently ignoring the problematic structure of LIV. “This is move six in a long game of chess,” he posted. “You won’t believe moves 32-37. That’s when it gets REALLY good.”

This reminds me of one of my favorite tracks  from Greg Norman Greatest Hits Album, the one where he promised to revolutionize the game and delivered a, checking notes, pimped out golf cart that went exactly nowhere.  I'm on the edge of my seat to see Phil's Moves 32-37, though I'm guessing this 3D chess game exists only in Phi's mind.  Not that it matters, because apparently the check cleared....

Or, yanno, just let Eamon go on:

Leaving aside the smug gibberish you’d expect from the smartest guy ever to be bailed out by butchers, it’s unsurprising that he clings to some mysterious master plan that we’re all too dumb to grasp. The bill of goods that Norman sold in public, Mickelson pitched to players in private: LIV guys could cherry-pick events from other tours; they would be eligible for majors; they would be hailed as innovators. Instead, the courts said no, the majors said ‘earn it’ and public opinion said they are pawns for sportswashing. The only legitimacy LIV can boast was conferred upon it via the Framework Agreement by the very tours it sought to topple.

The position argued by LIV and a few of its players on ranking points is grounded in the same trait that drew many to its ranks: entitlement. They’re entitled to enormous compensation that the open market has never considered feasible. They’re entitled to job security, regardless of performance. They’re entitled to entry into the most meaningful events on name recognition alone. They’re entitled to be ranked among the world’s best golfers despite almost never measuring themselves against the best. They’re entitled to be accommodated by a system they simultaneously deride as obsolete.

Yeah, there was only one reason to ever believe anything those two say, and that had to do with all those zeros and commas on the checks...

But, as your humble blogger presciently predicted long ago, that sense of entitlement is like poa, it spreads everywhere:

That sense of entitlement isn’t exclusive to LIV. It has disfigured elite golf, in the expectations of PGA Tour players who have never sold a ticket nor drawn an eyeball, and in the various entities that discreetly doffed their caps to Al-Rumayyan in hopes that his bankroll would eventually be directed toward them rather than ranged against them. The unseemly dash to be next in line at the trough has been underway for some time.

The bickering over world rankings is no different from every other combative cul-de-sac the sport has visited in the past two years. It boils down to one thing: guys who freely chose cash over competitive legitimacy, and who don’t think they should have to live with the consequences of their decisions. And that’s their problem, not the OWGR’s.

He's right that it's their problem, but Rory and Tiger have used tit to infect the rest of the game as well, so we're all losers.

LIV Musings -  I'm up against the clock, but the most interesting part of Phil's OWDR screed is his conspiracy mongering, in which he can't seem to discern among the varied organizations.  From Geoff:

In a Twitter response to fellow former Masters champion Trevor Immelman, Mickelson alleged

that the men’s majors were “protecting themselves” by denying LIV players points. He said the majors never intended to give points and believes the Lords of Augusta, Liberty Corner, St Andrews and Frisco are conducting the PGA Tour’s bidding because “the PGA Tour tv contract is based on owgr criteria for them to get all their money.”

(The majors have separate deals with networks and do not benefit from the PGA Tour’s arrangement with CBS, NBC and/or ESPN+.)

Mickelson said the Tour “would lose leverage in negotiations if LIV got points” even though the Ponte Vedra-based organization is wrapping up year two of a nine-year television deal and not believed to be in any media negotiations.

Obviously there's a high level of overlap and associated cooperation among the various parties... How dare they organize the golf ecosystem before the Saudis got involved!  

But to watch these four organizations operate since LIV launched is to see a pattern of risk avoidance.... they don't want any part of the legal drama, and they've mostly stayed above the fray, at least as far as participation in their events is concerned.  Do they favor Jay as opposed to the scary MoFos?  Well, any normal person would...

Oh, and I do love Geoff's graphic.... not least because he got Phil's iconic calves into the mix.

4) last but not least, Tour has BORROWED against the tv deal! If they don't hit their bench marks and don't get all their tv money (from CBS:) they will have an immediate capital call. Don't believe me? Ask Sean McManus

There is a ring of truth to those claims and it’s certainly an issue for all involved if PGA Tour events are too heavily weighted given the media deal claims of Mickelson. However, it was known for years that the Tour lobbied hard for a new OWGR system, believing a majority of the best golfers played on the U.S.-based Tour and were not getting enough points. All entities who have hinted at an OWGR minimum in the current TV deal have said it was a last minute addition to the Tour’s contract and came after the revised ranking process was designed (but not yet implemented).

Mickelson also accused the Masters, PGA Championship, U.S. Open and The Open of colluding to protect their events (even though they’d love nothing more than for all of this to go away).

Whether they borrowed or not, they've to some extent mortgaged their feedlot to head off the LIV threat, not exactly breaking news.  It's just hard to see where the other four families would assume the risk of defending the Tour's interests.

What it feels like is a four-year old's temper tantrum, not to say that there may not be an interesting fact or two in the rant (or that the Tour's reaction is above reproach).  But one does have to note that Phil hasn't exactly engaged with the arguments presented by Mr. Dawson, in fact he's completely compromised on that subject.  Because when Mr. Dawson notes the absence of a relegation process, he's calling out Phil first and foremost.

But here's the other interesting bit on this subject:

Report: PGA Tour evaluating alternative sources of capital beyond current framework agreement with PIF

My instincts say that there is much less here than meets the eyes, but I'm also completely out of time.  So, if you would be so kind t hold those thoughts, I will dive in to this tomorrow.