Well, a narrow but real category took a hit on Thursday: Golfers Speaking Words. Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson were playing us, word-wise and otherwise, until they jumped. Maybe that’s the way of the world. I had a friend, active on big stages in business and politics, who once said, “Honesty is the best policy, but it’s not the only policy.” We all see it, every day and everywhere. But golf was supposed to be, I don’t know, different. A world apart.
Golfers Speaking Words for $500 million please, Alex.
I’m taking Jon Rahm’s about-face more seriously and more personally than I did when Brooksie and Bry-Bry and DJ played dumb and went LIV. Two things I like (liked?) best about Rahm are the Basque emotion with which he plays this Calvinist game and the spectacular English, his second language, he uses to describe his golfing life. In February 2022, 22 long months ago, Rahm said his “fealty” was to the PGA Tour. Sounded so cool at the time. Since then, Rahm got bought. His fealty got bought for, what, a mere $500 million? Whatever.
The reason some feel ill or hurt or burned, or something, now goes beyond Rahm’s move to the funny-money tour with 54-hole events to the tune of “Rich Baby Daddy.” (Yes, of course: I had to look it up.) We thought golf was special, different, not part of the grubby everyday world. I mean, it is for us. Right? Please tell me you agree with that.
And so we thought it the same for them, the highest of the high priests. That’s why we still talk about Hogan and Hagen, Young Tom and his (this one’s for you, Tiger) Pops. They played for money, of course, but a golfing life, at their level, was far more than the payday, because, you know, they played golf! Golf! There is something transcendent about the game. (Updike, once more with feeling: “Golf is of games the most mystical, the least earthbound, the one wherein the walls between us and the supernatural are rubbed thinnest.” For starters, it’s (usually) an outdoor game that takes hours to play and requires patience and skill and practice, and its only moment of violence is at impact. (Sweet-swinging DL3, at impact, as a kid, no hat, his every hair flying every which way, his lips pursed. Don’t tell me it’s not a sport.) The only thing that might get hurt, over the course of a round, is your ego. Sixty million people around the world know about that. So it has been a lot of fun, for the past 150 years or so, for us to trust their posted scores, to see their grace in victory and defeat, to see their efforts to rise to the game’s many challenges. They were us, just better at golf.
It hurts when we find our emotion has been misspent.
I’m reading tea leaves here, but when Rory McIlroy resigned from the PGA Tour board, I figured he could see what was coming, for the board to vote on a merger with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the people who brought you (by way of their funding) LIV Golf, and he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
It’s hard to imagine the PIF managers and the PGA Tour managers continuing to negotiate now that the PIF has bought Jon Rahm’s fealty. Because the math is obvious: That hire was good for LIV and bad for the Tour. Team golf based on, what, exactly? I don’t get it. Shotgun tournaments played without a cut over 54 holes, where everybody wins? I don’t get it. Seems like an entertainment product. But Rahm’s presence makes it marginally more serious, no question about that.
Rahm talked to a dozen reporters on Thursday and to LIV Golf’s own David Feherty and to Bret Baier of Fox News. Between Rahm’s own words, and the million more that followed them, the most telling thing got lost, and it was right there, on the LIV website, from Lawrence Burian, LIV’s chief operating officer:
“LIV Golf is here to stay. The addition of Jon re-emphasizes that our league is not slowing down. We are continuing to invest and build aggressively for LIV’s long-term and exciting future.”
LIV Golf is here to stay. I know words can fail you over time, but that doesn’t sound like posturing. That sounds like a position. That’s a memo to Jay Monahan. You don’t control LIV’s future. How could he? The Saudis have billions and billions, and this is, it seems obvious to me, not about starting a profitable business. Golf is a capitalist’s tool. The great Saudi wealth is not based on capitalism as we in the United States think of the word. It is based on a choke-hold on the world’s oil supply. But that won’t last forever.
Augusta National and its televised spring invitational, the Masters, is at the absolute epicenter of global golf and American corporate life. If you’re a caddie, a writer, a fan, a player, you want to be at the Masters. If you’re in the .0001 percent, you want to be in the members’ locker room. The reigning Masters champion is Jon Rahm, now a LIV golfer. The two guys who finished second this year, Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka, are LIV golfers. The other LIV golfers who are members of the Tuesday Night Supper Club are Sergio Garcia, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Patrick Reed, Charl Schwartzel and Bubba Watson. By connection, Yasir or somebody is getting closer to the inner sanctum of, really, everything. Every material thing, that is.
This is the year of the coat for Jon “Fealty” Rahm. The green club coat he got for winning the Masters, the black LIV bomber jacket he wore in New York City on Thursday afternoon.
Remember 10 years ago when the USGA sold its TV deal to Fox Sports for $1.1 billion? It was kind of weird, because NBC Sports (many would say) did a damn good job with the various USGA championships, the U.S. Open most particularly. I mean, they had Johnny, they had Rog, they had Richie Leible as a Steadicam operator, walking backwards, getting us inside. The USGA-Fox deal was supposed to go from 2015 to 2027. By 2020, Fox was out and NBC Sports was back in.
As we saw on Thursday, you can buy most anything, if you have the money for it. But you can’t buy passion. You can’t buy history. And you can’t buy love.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Bamberger@firepitcollective.com