My swing is not what you’d call a thing of beauty. But then, in a golfing community that’s full of peculiarities, curiosities and absurdities, there are not many oil paintings. I have a colleague, for instance, who attacks the ball with such strained, startling vigour, he looks like he’s driving a wooden post into the ground with a fencing maul.
My approach, meanwhile, tends to be more genteel and I occasionally find myself adopting that time-honoured technique favoured by the great Sam Snead who would quietly hum The Blue Danube to promote a smooth, rhythmic swing of unwavering elegance and efficiency.
Of course, for all these good intentions, the fairly panic-stricken, fraught nature of golf at this correspondent’s level doesn’t really lend itself to the measured cadences of a Strauss waltz.
By the time I’ve wheezed and gasped my way to the fourth tee, a soundtrack more suited to my increasingly flustered swing is the tune that used to accompany the slapstick pandemonium of the chase scene from the bloomin’ Benny Hill Show. What a palaver.
Talking of swings, you may have noticed that the DP World Tour unveiled its all-singing, all-dancing 2024 schedule the other day. The swings in question are a series of swings that will give the old European circuit more swing than a song by Duke Ellington.
The schedule will be broken up into three phases with the first featuring a series of these global swings. There will be an Opening Swing, an International Swing, an Asian Swing, a European Swing and a Closing Swing. Are you getting into the swing of it yet? Or have you lost the plot like this scribe’s ruddy golf swing?
The second phase of the season will be known as the Closing Nine, with a run of national Opens and historic events, before the whole show draws to a conclusion with the DP World Tour play-offs in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
In addition to all this razzmatazz, there will be various incentives and financial rewards for the top performers in those various swingy things.
In total, the 2024 campaign, which many have suggested is all rather convoluted, will feature a minimum of 44 events across 24 different countries with the overall prize fund coming in at a record £114 million.
According to the tour’s chief executive, Keith Pelley, the new structure will “guarantee drama and excitement” across the year. Money can buy you lots of things but can it buy you guaranteed drama and excitement? Not in this game. Check-in with me as the Soudal Open meanders to a finale and we’ll re-assess Pelley’s enthusiastic declarations.
Those final two events in the Middle East, meanwhile, will have a combined purse of $19 million. Will that be enough to entice some of the game’s biggest names to come back over from the US and sprinkle their stardust on them? In these cash-sodden times, you wouldn’t guarantee it. What were we saying about money buying you this, that and the other?
In the upper echelons of golf, where money seems to grow on tees, two events worth nearly $20 million can easily be treated with shrugging indifference. A few months ago at the turn of the year, the 2023 DP World Tour season got underway in the desert and was eagerly promoted with the kind of grand fanfare you’d get with the 20th Century Fox flourish. But it still went a bit flat.
The Abu Dhabi showpiece was worth a whopping $9 million yet it attracted just one player – Shane Lowry – from the world’s top 20.
At the time, Lee Westwood, the DP World Tour stalwart who had already defected to the LIV rebellion, mulled over the general state of affairs and gave his own opinion on a hugely lucrative event that still struggled to lure in the big hitters. “If you’d have told me that I’d be playing in a $9million tournament on (the DP World) tour I’d struggle to believe you,” he said of the changing financial face of the Old World circuit. “But then if you told me there would only be one member of the world’s top 20 in the field, I’d think you were mad.”
Professional golf in the modern era is a bit mad, though. Money mad that is. And we’re not just talking about the LIV gravy train here. I noticed some statistics recently that showed that 16 players on the PGA Tour had earned over $10 million in their careers without ever winning an event. It’s nice work if you can get it. Jack Nicklaus, with 18 major wins on a vast cv, racked up about $5.7 million in his entire PGA Tour career. Different times.
The times they are a-changing too in the current climate as the various tours plough on in all sorts of rich furrows. The Asian Tour, for instance, stops off in St Andrews this week for one of its International Series tournaments which is bankrolled by LIV.
What will come, meanwhile, of the proposed alliance of the PGA Tour, the DP World Tour and the Saudi Public Investment Fund remains to be seen. Even the greatest soothsayers and prophets are not sure of the future of that. One thing that we can say with authority, however, is that the elite campaigners, wherever they are playing, have never had it so good.
