There must surely be days when Jay Monahan can empathize with Winston Churchill’s wry observation that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. As commissioner of a “member-led” organization, Monahan is bound by the political reality that the PGA Tour’s lower orders—many of whom couldn’t be identified in a line-up by fans—wield power equal to its upper echelon, upon whom the success of his product depends.
Those are some awfully tight handcuffs when you’re fighting an outfit fueled by personal animus and financed by Saudi Arabian oil money, with no apparent accountability on either. Which raises the question of whether the PGA Tour’s very business model may one day be a sacred cow that Monahan and his board are forced to slaughter.
The negatives associated with LIV Golf are almost as plentiful as the social media bots it employs to “whatabout” critics and otherwise rally those whose susceptibility to automated arguments is painfully evident in the body politic. There’s the sportswashing on behalf of a loathsome regime, the questionable competitive standards, the laughable shotgun starts, the shallow fields, the ever-changing teams component. But LIV also may have gotten one thing right that its rivals face an uphill battle to copy: contracting its talent.
