Thursday, December 14, 2023

Thursday Themes - Dry Wasatch Edition

My ski season morphed into Groundhog Day so quickly that I barely noticed.  There was some snow, past tense being the key bit, but not even a hint a fresh in the long-term forecast, so we're skiing the same three groomers ad nauseum.  Wouldn't be an issue if we weren't bored with them from the prior days....

Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.

LIV Hijinks - It's quite the mess, but your funny bone may come into play as we amuse ourselves with a few LIV-infused bits.  First, we've been reliably (not to mention insufferably) informed that this is all about growing the game, and nothing brings new participants to our ancient game quite like radio silence:

Jon Rahm rocked the world of professional golf with last week's decision to leave the PGA Tour for LIV Golf. But after making a few initial media appearances around the announcement, golf fans shouldn't expect to see the Spanish star for a couple months.

The reigning Masters champ was in Spain on Wednesday to accept an award for his career from a private club in his native Basque Country. But he was surprised to see any cameras there and made it very clear he would not be doing any media, according to a Reuters report.

"I am under very strict instructions not to do public events, which I have imposed on myself a little bit for myself, and for the change I have given to the world of golf in the last week," Rahm said.

When asked if he planned on giving an interview, the 29-year-old added, "No!"

I encourage the reader to reread that penultimate 'graph and appreciate the nature-nurture moment in presents.  Is that level of disingenuousness endemic, or has it been developed as a result of his longstanding friendship with a certain southpaw?  

The writer, however, seems awful credulous:

It's unclear where these instructions are coming from, but it has been reported that previous LIV contracts include restrictions about interviews needing to be pre-approved. Regardless, it sounds like the normally outgoing Rahm won't be talking until the start of the 2024 LIV season.

Unclear?  I guess it's literally his first rodeo, because the pattern of inadvertent truth followed by modified, limited qualification seems familiar enough.  But, just to make it easy for the newbies at Golf Digest, these order come from Riyadh, yanno, the folks to whom Mr. Rahm has pledged, what's that word, fealty.

Ironically, there is one guy that should pull a Rahm and shut the F up, it would be the loveable Boom Boom Couples.  Cameron Young is still running to his mailbox every morning hoping to find that promised ticket to Rome, but I'm sure he's got more considered commentary for us:

Among past and present PGA Tour pros, few have offered more biting commentary on LIV Golf
than Fred Couples, the seemingly easy-going dude who didn’t let much faze him on the course.

In LIV, “Boom Boom” found a big target he couldn’t ignore, and he’s pulled no punches with some of the most notable players in the game. In one rant at a California PGA Tour Champions event in March, he called Sergio Garcia a “clown” and former Ryder Cup teammate Phil Mickelson a “nutbag,” though he admitted the latter is among the 10 best players of all time.

Hey, just like the proverbial stopped clock, I'll concede that he nailed those two data points.... But as for his latest rant, he really should be put under a gag order:

Couples acknowledged that players can choose to compete wherever they want, but doesn’t want to hear that money makes LIV great.

“One hundred million doesn’t get it; $200 million doesn’t get it; $300 million doesn’t get it, but for $400 million, it’s a great product, and it’s a great show?” Couples said. “My a--, OK. Tell me the next guy … ‘I’m going for free, boys. I love this [LIV] tour. I don’t like the PGA Tour anymore.’ No one’s gonna do that.

“I wanna see the next superstar say, ‘I’m going to LIV, you know why I’m going? Because it is unreal.’” [The PGA Tour plays] Riviera, and they play TPC Phoenix in front of 300,000 people. I want ’em to go for free. Then go on CNN, and every TV show, and say why they’re going is because it’s that good.”

It's not that he's wrong, but it's just one heck of a moment to try to differentiate the guys that stay because they're less money hungry... I don't know, all those LIV guys seem able to find hats that fit.

Appearing on Monday night on SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio, the 64-year-old, 11-time tour winner was again on a roll in the aftermath of the move of World No. 3 Jon Rahm to LIV. Last week, after he signed his deal reportedly worth at least $500 million, Rahm said, “Obviously the past two years there’s been a lot of evolving on the game of golf, things have changed a lot and so have I. Seeing the growth of LIV Golf, seeing the evolution of LIV Golf and innovation is something that has really captured my attention.”

That kind of talk makes Couples go off.

“Don’t sit there and then go on and say, ‘they’re changing the game,'” he said. “What are they changing? Actually, for 50 years, golf has been changed. Arnold Palmer changed it. Jack Nicklaus changed it. Tiger Woods changed it.

“The LIV Tour ain’t changing a thing.”

Their product certainly does suck, but again the timing is funny, because all of a sudden they're using the C-word, first with this trial balloon:

“(Rahm) has been vocal about some stuff he didn’t love but he wouldn’t have come to LIV if he thought he was going to win 10 tournaments a year and have no competition,” Talor Gooch told
Golf Digest. “He’s a true competitor. It’s beyond exciting [to have Rahm].”

“We haven’t had an open forum discussion with all the players,” said Gooch, LIV’s 2023 individual champion who was recently traded from Bubba Watson’s RangeGoats GC to Brooks Koepka’s Smash GC for Matthew Wolff. “But you get both sides … guys who would welcome (changing to 72 holes) and some guys who are opposed to it. Discussions will be had and it’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.

“I think LIV Golf was meant to be something different; I think it’s not supposed to be a carbon copy of the rest of professional golf. I lean towards keeping it at 54 holes. Part of it, too, from my experience on the PGA Tour, was Thursdays are just irrelevant from a fan perspective (except for) only a couple times a year.”

The great Talor Gooch, who apparently still hasn't used his LIV riches to purchase that missing "Y".  When last Talor assaulted our eardrums, he was comparing the LIV team competition to the Ryder Cup, so one does need to consider the source.

But that was non-specific, now comes this existential trial balloon:

My amusement comes from this in the second 'graph:

Now that Rahm is the proud owner of a LIV Golf letterman’s jacket after jumping from the PGA Tour and DP World Tour for a deal reported to be worth somewhere between $300 million and $600 million, the question is whether he might have enough sway to introduce tweaks to the fledgling circuit.

Wouldn't that turn the letterman's jacket into a collector's item given that, were they to go to 72 holes, it would be comically humiliating to continue to operate under that discredited Roman numeral 54?   far from a done deal yet, as Gooch makes clear:

“We haven't had an open forum discussion with all the players,” said Gooch, who last week was transferred from Bubba Watson’s RangeGoats GC to Koepka’s Smash GC. “But you get both sides … guys who would welcome it [72 holes] and some guys who are opposed to it. Discussions will be had, and it'll be interesting to see what comes of it.”

Gooch contends there are varying opinions among players, with some who would vote to add a fourth round to LIV events, even though he isn’t in favor of the move.

“I think LIV Golf was meant to be something different; I think it's not supposed to be a carbon copy of the rest of professional golf. I lean towards keeping it at 54 holes,” Gooch said. “Part of it too, from my experience on the PGA Tour, was Thursdays are just irrelevant from a fan perspective [except for] only a couple times a year.

Sayeth the man whose tour has made Friday-Sunday irrelevant....

I never got around to blogging that blockbuster trade, but that team competition seems awfully.....well, bogus?

During this span, another couple moves involving LIV went down. And while neither will draw a fraction of the attention the others did (Sorry, guys), one trade is—at least, on paper—one of the most puzzling transactions in sports history. Drum roll, please!

Matthew Wolff for Talor Gooch?! Say what?!

In case you haven't been following LIV this past season, these are two guys going in very different directions with their careers. Wolff, once considered to be potentially the best player of the Class of 2019 that includes Collin Morikawa and Viktor Hovland, finished 27th in the 2023 LIV standings. Just one spot ahead of Pat Perez. In other words, not great.

Gooch, on the other hand, had a fantastic campaign, winning three times and finishing first on the season-long points list to claim an $18 million bonus. So why would the Range Goats, who finished fourth in the team standings, trade the league's best player for the league's 27th-best player? That's what we want to know!

Yeah, because they can't get rid of Wolff and Brooks might have hurt him if he wasn't removed from his team, but wow!

Though probably not quite this significant:

More like Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi, methinks.

PGA Tour Hijinks - I'm all for merit raises, but is there a guy (excluding, perhaps Matthew Wolff) that had a worse year?

Sportico obtained the Tour’s IRS filings for 2022 and shared some key details, including increases to Commissioner Jay Monahan’s compensation, the Tour’s legal fees, revenue and overall expenses.

Monahan’s reported compensation for 2022 was $18.6 million, up from $13.9 million in 2021. That $18.6 million includes a $1.8 million base salary, $9.2 million in bonuses and incentives, and according to the Tour, an actuarial estimate of $7.4 million for non-cash benefits that Monahan will receive when he retires.

That's for 2022, when he was still, in theory, fighting the righteous fight against the Saudis, but remind me how that all worked out?  Though, given where we are today, those non-cash benefits might be payable fairly soon.

Jay's job is obviously to represent the interests of the players, the question being which players.  I'm sure that Patrick has Jay's ear, but you might have heard that others are wondering about their representatives:

On Sunday, 21 members of the Tour’s rank-and-file signed a letter written by a top-flight
litigation attorney and delivered to the PGA Tour policy board demanding answers on the state of the Tour’s negotiations with potential investment partners and a dialogue with the Tour’s upper chamber of decision-makers. The letter, written by Jacob W. Buchdahl, a partner at the high-powered firm Susman Godfrey, represents the most threatening step yet for the Tour’s playing class as it reconciles with changes to the Tour schedule that promise to enrich its top members.

The letter does not threaten any imminent legal action, but appears to show that at least a chunk of the Tour’s membership has consulted legal advice as the Tour policy board prepares for one of the most significant stretches in its existence. The 21 players listed in the letter are Tour lifers — including Lanto Griffin, James Hahn, Scott Piercy and former Masters champ Danny Willett — many of whom have been rankled by changes to the Tour way of life brought about by LIV. Chez Reavie, No. 111 in the world, is the highest-ranked player to sign the letter.

The heart of Buchdahl’s letter surrounds the current state of negotiations between the PGA Tour and a pair of high-profile investors, the Strategic Sports Group (or SSG) and Saudi Public Investment Fund (or PIF). On Sunday, the Tour policy board announced in a memo to players that it had agreed to “advance negotiations” with the SSG, a group of blue-blood sports investors that currently owns at least nine professional sports franchises. Later this week, Tour commissioner Jay Monahan is expected to meet with PIF chief Yasir Al-Rumayyan in an effort to hammer out the final stages of a separate round of negotiations before the pair’s Dec. 31 deadline.

Chez, it's very simple, you don't matter and have no representation.  The key bit here is in the last sentence:

At stake for both negotiations is a piece of equity in PGA Tour Enterprises, a for-profit subsidiary of the Tour that is expected to siphon off most of the Tour’s moneymaking properties — similar to the way other professional sports leagues operate their franchise models. The cost of equity is one of the issues at the center of the negotiations, though it is believed from the Tour’s initial “framework agreement” with the PIF that the Tour stands to make several billion dollars from the arrangement. A select group of players is also expected to receive pieces of equity under the agreement.

Obviously the guys signing this letter won't be receiving numbered stock certificates.  But if all the profitable assets are moved to the new entity, and I'm unclear whether that includes the actual tournaments and media contracts, and the equity is distributed, what happens nest year when a new talent emerges?  Yes, of course they can make additional equity grants, but the guys deciding on those (Tiger and Patrick, presumably) are the very guys that will be diluted by such equity grants.  Can you say "Conflict of interest"?

Kevin Van Valkenburg has an interesting piece up at No Laying Up, that I'll use for my graceful exit.  I know that I had promised to blog the mixed event and the Father-Son, but you'll have to remember that I lie.  Buried in Kevin's piece is some useful relative numbers that I think deserves to be the lede:

We know LIV ratings have been laughable, so let’s ignore them for a second. Let’s take the PGA Tour’s most important event — The Players Championship — as Exhibit A when we examine the allegation of golf’s cultural irrelevance.

In 2023, the Players Sunday broadcast drew 2.83 million viewers. That was up 11 percent from the previous year.

Do you know how many people tuned in to watch Ohio State play Michigan in college football’s marquee regular season match-up? 19.07 million.

When the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles faced off recently, it was watched by 29.02 million people.

The most important event on the PGA Tour drew about 500,000 fewer eyeballs than a game between Iowa State and Kansas State.

Are we really supposed to believe, based on numbers like this, Rahm’s $450 million contract (who knows the real number when accounting for clauses and equity) is driven by a real market? It’s asinine.

In a rational world, those golf viewership numbers would define the economic value of the event and the Tour, and would control purse sizes.  Instead, we have internalized the Saudi's sportswashing-inflated purses, and the Patrick Cantlay's of the world believe this has defined the value of the golf ecosystem.  I suppose it does, at least for the moment, but what happens when the Saudi's tire of Phil and Sergio's acts?

Kevin led with this anecdote, which sounds like your humble blogger on June 6th:

I’m often hesitant to assign much weight to anecdotal evidence, but this week, during one of the busiest seven-day stretches in the history of professional golf, I received a text from a friend that stopped me cold.

We don’t play golf together as much as we’d like, owing to our busy work schedules, but he follows the game closely and reads about it constantly. He listens to podcasts, watches videos, then shares them with friends. He is, in simplistic terms, a golf sicko. He also belongs to what is arguably the sport’s most coveted demographic: He owns his own business, he has disposable income, he isn’t married to any particular political ideology, and he buys new clubs as often as some people buy golf balls.

He wanted to let me know he was fed up with the professional game. Done with it.

He still loved the sport, and still looked forward to teeing it up together, but he wasn’t going to watch anymore. He might tune in for the majors, but that was probably it. The PGA Tour and LIV? All of it had started to feel a little gross. Everything going on — whether it was Jon Rahm’s departure to LIV; the squabbling over billions of dollars in equity in a potential merger between tours; even the governing bodies’ decision to try and curtail distance — left him feeling used.

“The fan experience,” he wrote, “is secondary at best. And fans don’t like getting fucked with.”

As someone who makes a living writing about golf, and frequently commenting on the professional game, I would love to pretend my friend is an outlier. He might be mad now, but this too shall pass, as the idiom goes.

In recent days, I’ve come to realize he is more likely the tip of the iceberg.

My prediction at the star of this mess was that we would end up hating each and every one of those guys, and it seems that we're ahead of schedule.

As easy as it would be to point the finger solely at those who went to LIV, there are very few innocent bystanders here. Those who stayed with the PGA Tour are now mud-wrestling over different piles of money and control. They do not seem to care if the sport (at least the professional version of it) is irrevocably broken in this process, as long as a handful of them achieve generational wealth.

I understand, in a micro sense, why Rahm went back on his word and took LIV’s money. He almost certainly looked at the mess that is the PGA Tour and realized he was under no obligation to support that clusterfuck of ego and uncertainty. I can’t pretend I know Rahm well, but I’ve been around him enough to know he is driven by pride more than money. He did not feel sufficiently valued by the PGA Tour, so why help them wade through a murky future when someone was dangling half a billion dollars in his face?

With all the private equity sharks circling the PGA Tour at the moment, many of them whispering in Tiger Woods’ ears about a way to box out the Saudis, you can understand why Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the Chairman of the Public Investment Fund, felt he had to make a bold chess move with Rahm. Whether the Masters winner is a knight or a pawn probably doesn’t matter, though I’m sure Rahm sees himself as the former, not the latter.

In a macro sense, I wish Rahm would have remained true to his word, because he is among the most thoughtful, principled, interesting people in professional golf. I fear he’ll be neutered now that it is part of his job to be a mouthpiece for an autocratic government. Perhaps he’ll prove me wrong, and I hope he does. It will be interesting to study his temper when his 2024 U.S. Open prep involves three rounds of team golf in front of dozens of fans at Golf Club of Houston in sweltering conditions in June. If the CW Network is still bothering to count viewers, they can put me down for that one.

I wish Rahm stayed true to his word, as well, but given that Jay Monahan and Jimmy Dunne puked a fast one on him, it's hard to argue that he should be the loner whose word still retains value.

But the larger problem is that the PGA Tour's legacy is far less robust than most folks understand.  When we look at the combined golf calendar we often lump it all together under the PGA Tour banner, but that's quite misleading.  Right now those four majors have been substantially, what's the term of art, elevated?  But the PGA Tour itself is revealed as substantially diminished in comparison, and there's similarly diminished reasons to tune in.

The next few months will be quite fascinating, though it remains hard to see anything in it for the fans.

It's a chill life here in Utah, although I'm not at all clear about my blogging plans.  There are some plans involving the family, though the absence of fresh snow may impact those.  I don't know when I'll blog, but you should just do as you always have, check back early and often.

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