This will undoubtedly be the most unpopular statement you will see or hear all week at The Arnold Palmer Invitational.
The PGA Tour will cringe at what I’m about to say.
PGA Tour players will wince.
Traditional golf fans will be offended.
Arnie himself, sitting up in That Big 19th Hole in the Sky, will likely spit out his mouthful of iced tea and lemonade (with a little Ketel One mixed in) when he gets wind of this column.
But it must be said even at the risk of getting my daily meal ticket revoked at Bay Hill’s media hospitality tent.
Forgive me, Arnie, for what I’m about to say, but here goes:
Thank you, LIV.
Thank you, LIV Golf Tour.
Thank you for making The Arnold Palmer Invitational and the PGA Tour better than ever.
There, I said it.
When The Arnie tees off Thursday at Bay Hill, it will be the most star-studded field in the history of the tournament (Tiger’s heyday notwithstanding). In all, 27 of the top 30 players in the world will be here, and the only reason three are missing — No. 5 Cameron Smith, No. 23 Joaquin Niemann and No. 27 Abraham Ancer — is because they are members of the LIV Tour.
When Arnie was alive, his tournament always attracted really good fields because the world’s top players wanted to show their respect to a man who meant so much to growing the game. Even after Arnie passed away seven years ago, the PGA Tour increased the tournament’s status and its prize money as a show of respect for the King.
But the field this week is off-the-charts good mainly because LIV lit a fire under the PGA Tour’s derriere. With more and more players defecting for LIV’s big paychecks, the PGA Tour started pouring money into its own purses. It established The Arnie and 13 other tournaments as can’t-miss events by increasing the purses from $12 million to $20 million. The stars are pretty much required to play in 12 of these 13 “designated” tournaments.
In addition, it was reported Wednesday that many of these designated events such as The Arnie, starting next season, will become limited fields (only the top 70 or 80 players) with no 36-hole cuts. Hmmm, that sounds ererily similar to what the LIV Tour is already doing.
When those reports surfaced Wednesday, outspoken LIV golfer Ian Poulter quickly went on Twitter and parroted a George Bernard Shaw quote: “Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery — it’s the sincerest form of learning.”
What does this all mean?
It means it’s a win-win for most everybody.
The PGA Tour stars win because they’re competing for a lot more money. Meanwhile, the PGA Tour fans win because we get to see all the top stars regularly playing against each other in tournaments other than the majors. If this had been done years ago, LIV would probably not exist today.
Rory McIlroy, who has become the de facto spokesperson for PGA Tour players, said something eye-opening last year when his Tour was in the midst of making the changes to upgrade its product.
“I think if you’re trying to sell a product to TV and to sponsors and to try to get as many eyeballs on professional golf as possible, you need to at least let people know what they’re tuning in for,” McIlroy said. “When I tune into a Tampa Bay Buccaneers game, I expect to see Tom Brady throw a football. When I tune into a Formula 1 race, I expect to see Lewis Hamilton in a car. Sometimes what’s happened on the PGA Tour is we all act independently and we sort of have our own schedules, and that means that we never really get together all that often.”
Translation: It took the LIV Tour to actually make the PGA players care about the good of their sport Tour.
Even so, there remains much animosity toward Phil Mickelson and some of the other LIV defectors who have bolted the PGA Tour because they wanted more financial security and autonomy.
However, couldn’t a case be made that the LIV Tour was started for some of the the same reasons the PGA Tour itself came into being? Let’s not forget that Jack Nicklaus along with Arnie were the key figures in the rival American Professional Golfers (the touring pros) breaking off from the PGA of America (the club pros) in the late 1960s.
Then, as now, lawsuits were filed and there were hard feelings on both sides. Some of golf’s old-time superstars back then — Sam Snead, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen — sided with the traditional PGA of America while the popular golfers of the day, Jack and Arnie, believed that the touring pros (APG) deserved more money and more clout over a sport that they were mostly responsible for popularizing. Finally, the touring pros stared down the PGA of America and the APG got its way and eventually rebranded itself as the PGA Tour.
“It was the best thing that ever happened to the Tour,” former Masters winner Bob Goalby told Golf Magazine a few years ago. “When you look at how successful it has been, and all the money these guys play for now, so much of it came from those days.”
The same could be said about these days. Just as the rebels from the APG made professional golf better back then, the LIV rebels have made pro golf better today. Of course, it’s not exactly the same in that the LIV Tour is funded by the mega-billions of Saudi Arabia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. And, yes, rooting for the Saudis to succeed is like rooting for the shark to devour the skinny-dipping hottie at the beginning of Jaws.
To make it worse, the arrogant, unlikable Greg Norman is the front man for LIV, but as galling as it is to admit, Norman is right when he talks about LIV’s impact on the PGA Tour.
“Since LIV’s come on board, the PGA Tour has stepped up,” he told ESPN recently. “They would never have done that without competition. Competition’s the best thing in any sport. The competition that LIV brought, the [PGA] Tour players should be thanking LIV.”
If the PGA Tour players won’t do it then a PGA Tour fan like myself certainly will:
Thank you, LIV, for making The Arnie better than ever.
