An Epic Battle in The Ongoing Civil War for Golf Hegemony, Or A Minor Skirmish With Opposing Sides Jockeying For Position, Control, and Influence Within The International Community of Golf?
Full disclosure: Jeff Waters is a PGA Master Professional with over fifty years of participation in the Game of Golf as a player, teacher, administrator, and broadcast journalist.
The views and opinions in this account are mine. They do not represent nor portray the positions and policies of The PGA of America, The PGA Tour, or the Golf Writers of America.
As the increasingly messy global civil war surrounding men’s Professional Golf enters the 2022-2023 golf season, it would seem there are few plausible ends or resolutions to this predicament other than multiple, lengthy, and costly lawsuits in courts of law, which neither side welcomes.
Such is the sad state of affairs and paradigm surrounding LIV Golf versus the PGA Tour.
The impasse at the center of this controversy is a classic case of corporate chicken, with unbridled greed, brand protection, and domination of the worldwide golf market in direct opposition to entrepreneurship, free enterprise, right to work, and unhampered entry into open marketplaces.
Both sides wonder which side will blink first, run out of resources, momentum, and supporters, or suffer defeat at the hands of the legal system.
It also appears as if the growing turmoil and chaos shrouding the two parties engaged in this unbending, intractable, not to mention stubborn confrontation between two deep-pocked and committed adversaries facing off to do battle is toxic, detrimental, and potentially ruinous for the sport and commercial enterprise that is the industry of Golf.
On a personal note, I spent eighteen months in business school and learned the following unassuming and straightforward lessons.
Whatever industry, service, or product you own, operate, or seek to control, you must manage, market, and sell it to the best of your ability while preserving your principal, avoiding taxes, and safeguarding your cash flow.
It is that simple.
Under the purview of market capitalism, open competition, and individual market incentives, the public will support LIV Golf if it presents a compelling, persuasive, and convincing product and service. If not, they won’t.
All the name-calling, damaging allegations, adversarial, and hostile finger-pointing are not conducive to improving the sport and promoting the international golf ecosystem.
It’s not us against them, Greg Norman competing against the PGA Tour, nor is it about tribalism, winning or losing.
It’s about growing the game and establishing unity and peaceful co-existence among a coalition of worldwide Golf organizations that encompasses the entire sporting world.
The Golf industry is a wide-reaching occupation pursued by thousands of professional athletes participating in twenty-three professional golf tours recognized worldwide.
It is a global game, spacious and durable enough to support and promote multiple professional tours as the sport, competition, and business continue to grow, progress, and evolve.
The PGA Tour does not own the golf industry as much as it tries to control, manipulate, and influence its boundaries.
While the current encounter centers around the Game of Golf with the combative, heavy-handed, monolithic, bully-pulpit of the PGA Tour, in alliance with its gang of Federation of PGA Tours, amalgamated against the upstart LIV Golf League funded by Saudi Arabi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and its unlimited oil riches, the present engagement has deeper more, profound philosophical implications.
The circumstances of the present narrative embody an ageless, classic, and never-ending struggle between selfish and greedy realms of business enterprise and high finance, with extensive resources and capital, exploiting solitary, independent entertainers.
Big guys picking on little guys that often lack similar resources, capital, and wherewithal to oppose them.
At the same time, overseers, in this instance, the PGA Tour, a mega-international conglomerate, operating in positions of trust and supposedly concerned about the fortunes and well-being of their subordinates, in this example, individual Golf Professionals, are taken advantage of, and used day-to-day to promote and advertise the PGA’s embedded corporate interests and brands—a throw-away mentality and zero-sum game that enslaves, manipulates, and suppresses a performer’s expression and creativity.
Remember, in this rivalry, The PGA Tour is a closed system seeking to guard its international product, control its participants, defend its market share, expand its global platform, and shelter its many corporate interests, all while benefiting from the United States Government’s Internal Revenues tax code under the concealment of a non-profit corporation.
Underneath the tax code accommodation, the PGA Tour’s business model has performed remarkably well for almost fifty years.
Simultaneously, Professional Golfers are entrepreneurial, self-employed, independent contractors with a narrow window for entry onto the Tour with its stringent restrictions, exacting entry requirements, and rigid qualifications at every level of competitive struggle.
Professional Golfers often function as modern-day gunslingers whose tools of the trade and personal appearances are leased to the highest bidders among the various promoters, sponsors, and companies willing to underwrite expenses and tournament purses while claiming each one of those expenditures as corporate tax deductions, cleverly masquerading as charitable donations and all fully tax-deductible.
A stipulation previous PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman sagaciously had written into the United States Tax Code establishing The PGA Tour as a Not-For-Profit Corporation.
The Tour aggressively promotes this faux bargain to a never-ending stream of aspirants from high schools, colleges, and min-tours that serve as resourceful and complimentary secondary minor league development and feeder systems, whose participants often struggle without remuneration or reimbursement for their decades of efforts with little or no reward.
Erstwhile contenders are battling for advancement to higher levels of competition.
Work hard, get lucky, and earn your way upward. If you’re good enough, you can play anywhere in the world and on any level, but only if the PGA Tour grants you a release from their binding, unilateral, and inflexible contracts, which seems very much in violation of the Federal Trade Commission’s rules restraining free trade and crafting a veritable noose encompassing want-to-be players necks preventing them from competing on other tours or in other countries.
As independent, self-supporting freelancers, all golfers at every level pay their entry fees and expenses while competing against other players, often for little or no incentive or guarantees.
At the same time, those same athletes risk exploitation by organizers and higher-ups and often perform their superiors bidding upon decree and demand—an age-old saga of power and control, haves and have-nots, capitalistic greed versus individual talent, and managerial imperatives versus the free agency of risk-taking, independent self-starting workers.
To paraphrase Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism and author of Wealth of Nations.
A self-employed Golf Professional who displays his talents on the golf course, using the skills developed and nurtured over many years of practice and frequent tournaments, he merges those accomplishments and success into three separate and distinct roles, as a contestant, owner of the business activity, and laborer.
Therefore, his efforts should award him winnings from the first task, profit from the second component, and wages from the third activity.
This is not how Professional Golfers are now rewarded for their productivity on PGA Tour.
Instead, they are at the mercy of archaic rules and policies limiting their participation and remuneration.
The Tour violates every capitalistic norm and operates more like a socialistic order controlling, exploiting, governing, and dictating its members’ output, production, and compensation.
In most cases, which is a sticky point in the present disagreement, the PGA Tour has admission requirements, rules of engagement, and qualifying criteria for membership, with severe penalties for non-compliance, including banishment, expulsion, and loss of playing privileges.
The PGA Tour requires members’ exclusive fidelity to their tournaments to receive prize money distribution and accumulation of points used for the Official World Golf Ranking (OWGR).
A universal ranking criteria with points awarded by finishing position and strength of the field in the four Major Championships and on the six major professional tours that comprise The International Federation of PGA Tours, including, The PGA Tour, DP World Tour, Asian Tour, PGA Tour of Australasia, Japan Golf Tour, and the Sunshine Tour.
The LIV Tour does not presently qualify under that criteria for entry of its members onto the PGA Tour, The Majors, Players Championship, The World Golf Championships, FedEx Cup, or the major Invitationals and designated events, including The Heritage, Memorial, Genesis, Arnold Palmer, The Travelers, and international Team events like the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup.
The oversized, influential, intimidating, and menacing PGA Tour and its Board of Directors control a closed system of rewards, patronage, allegiance, and loyalty.
Who threatens players with sanctions, penalties, and dismissal from its organization, unmistakably violating interstate commerce and right-to-work laws while obstructing unfettered competition.
The very basis of the Lawsuit LIV Golf has filed against the PGA Tour.
The legal issue is the
PGA Tour’s “conflicting events” stipulation prohibits tour members from competing in other events held at the same time as regular PGA Tour events unless they receive a release from the Commissioner’s office.
Commissioner Jay Monahan has vehemently opposed granting those releases to LIV members.
The Federal Trade Commission has been investigating the Tour for years to ascertain whether the conflicting-event rule constitutes a restraint to free trade.
The lawsuit is scheduled for early 2024.
There is no question that the PGA Tour, in its present iteration, is a bloated, over-commercialized product with too many meaningless events and nameless, faceless contestants who lack appeal and star power.
Many Professional Golf tournaments are dull, time-consuming, and provincial, avoiding many parts of the world where Golf has become exciting and appealing to entirely new cohorts of enthusiasts.
Professional Golf’s entire production needs shaking up and rejuvenation.
It requires an infusion of contemporary ideas, modernization of its concepts, novel thinking, and new management to survive this latest challenge to its supremacy in the worldwide marketplace.
Competition has always been a good thing; it makes everyone try harder, work better, and increase productivity.
Conversely, much has been written about Saudi Arabia’s tainted money, sordid human rights violations, funding sources, and lack of institutional transparency.
However, both examples are false equivalents—and double standards.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) has invested billions of dollars into other sporting enterprise ventures, “Sportswashing” its image worldwide while updating and modernizing its civil rights, humanitarian issues, and freedoms.
It is a work in progress, overcoming decades of systemic racism, ingrained cultural prejudice, gender discrimination, and xenophobic bigotry.
While imperfect, we should not fail to realize that the KSA has deep-rooted and historical connections to the United States and is an essential and valuable trading partner.
Many large businesses in The KSA conduct business nationally and internationally while sponsoring numerous PGA Tour events, players, and charities.
On the other hand, the PGA of America and, by association, the PGA Tour’s history of exclusion, ostracism, and marginalization is one of the most persuasive and suppressed of any sports organization in the cultivated world.
The PGA of America, the ruling body of Golf with almost thirty thousand members, including PGA Tour participants, has not always been open, encompassing, and inclusive.
America’s past, including the golf business, as we are all uncomfortably aware, has not been kind to women and minorities.
Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 abolishing slavery, leading to the passage of the United States Constitution’s thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, granting citizenship and voting rights to people of color, significantly increasing the civil rights of all people in America.
It would take fifty-seven years before the passage of the nineteenth amendment in 1920, granting all females the same rights, privileges, and responsibilities of citizenship.
Unfortunately, the business of Golf would lag even further behind in granting that same equality to minorities, people of color, and women.
The Professional Golfers’ Association of America was founded in 1916 by Rodman Wanamaker, whose name adorns the large trophy awarded to the winner of the annual PGA Championship.
It would take forty-five long years of struggle and perseverance before the PGA opened their membership to minorities and removed a “Caucasian-only” clause in their by-laws, allowing Charlie Sifford, in 1961, to become the first black member of the PGA.
A span of almost 100 years after the United States Constitution had supposedly guaranteed equal rights to people of color.
Another sixteen more years would pass before the bias, misogyny, intolerance, and discrimination of a predominately white and partisan organization would be exhausted, and women were finally allowed PGA membership in 1977.
The PGA Tour should not throw stones.
At stake in this confrontation is control over a vast global sports empire with all the attendant media rights, television broadcasts, streaming services, sponsorships, digital content, marketing power, imageries, and millions and millions of dollars in a widespread altercation between multiple professional organizations, multinational actors, broadcasting outlets, international governing bodies of Golf, and individual Golf Professionals that toil away in ignominy on fairways and greens for their livelihood.
This is not the first skirmish when battle lines have been drawn in the sand between these owners, management, corporate entities, and the players.
Hostility and conflict have been waged between those combatants going back to the days of Old Tom Morris and the infancy of the commercialization of the sport.
When Golf Professionals were servants and lower-cast members of the working class. Uneducated, impoverished, and unskilled, toiling in obscurity at the feet of noblemen and aristocrats while carrying out the bidding of the privileged and upper-class of that era.
The industrial revolution in the eighteenth century profoundly altered the structure of industry, culture, society, and Professional Golf.
Convenient and affordable railroad travel came to Europe, networking the British Islands and bisecting Scotland from Glasgow to Edinburgh and beyond to the northern coast, allowing inland access to the country’s linksland courses, and exposing the Scottish national game to a European public who were eagerly seeking an introduction to the fledgling sport and bringing newfound status to the occupation and business of Golf.
Exhibitions between clubs and individual players were advertised and marketed. Tickets peddled to audiences lined up to witness opposing golfing societies and notable players representing the leading clubs of Scotland, including The Royal and Ancient of Saint Andrew’s, Musselburgh’s Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, Leith Thistle, North Bernick, Perth, The Gentleman Golfers of Prestwick, and The Carnoustie Golf Links, all among the oldest and most storied Golf Associations in Scotland.
And audiences flocked from across the continent to watch, cheer and follow these performances. Golf Professionals were finally allowed at gentlemen’s tables and received the acclamation and respect they eventually earned for their performance on the links.
The dawn of the new century spawned new circumstances and changes that emerged and clarified the sport and industry of Golf.
In 1894 the United States Golf Association was formed, differentiating and refining the roles of Professionals and Amateurs.
1916 gave birth to the formation of the Professional Golfers Association of America, further codifying the position and employment of Golf Professionals.
In more recent times, as the sport of Golf burst into the business of Golf, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and other leading players and money winners of this era grumbled about television rights, endorsements, and the size of purses, leading in 1968 to divesting the Tournament Players Division away from the PGA of America and metamorphosing into the present PGA Tour.
And in 1983, moving to a fully exempt Tour with 125 players and limited fields, restricting entry and access to the professional tournaments it controlled, managed, and administered.
Effectuating an implicit monopoly of weekly events and accompanying broadcast rights to those tournaments.
As the first PGA Tour Commissioner, Joe Dey exercised absolute managerial and executive influence over the organization and players while claiming total allegiance and loyalty to the enterprise and controlling all media rights, revenue, and image content of the players, ensuring incontrovertible domination of Professional Golf.
The caveat was that the Tournament Player Division gave up ownership and authority over the administration and management of the four Major Golf Championships, their collective and very lucrative profit centers and revenue generators, and their respective participant entry requirements and criteria.
The Masters remained at the Augusta National, the United States Open belonged to the United States Golf Association, and The Open Championship stayed with the Royal and Ancient. The PGA Championship and Ryder Cup continued the providence of the PGA of America.
A sleight of hand, mistake, and colossal blunder the PGA Tour has tried mightily to rectify for years, to no avail, while trying earnestly to promote The Players Championship as a fifth Major Tournament to mixed results.
Can The Players Championship truthfully masquerade as a Major Championship if Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan, in a hussy fit, arbitrarily bans most of the top players and the defending Champion, Cam Smith, from defending his title because they joined a rival league and stripped them all of PGA Membership?
Public interest centering around those major tournaments has intensified and magnified tenfold, and the four Major Championships have become the season’s most valuable and influential events.
The PGA Tour would soon learn to their chagrin and irritation, that the Major Tournaments were more meaningful in prestige, legacy, and history than money.
The twenty-first century saw the commerce and enterprise of Golf spread exponentially internationally, with foreign players upgrading their talent and accomplishments.
And the concept of a Worldwide Professional Tour accelerated.
In 1967, Professionals Golfers the likes of Greg Norman from Australia, Seve Ballesteros, Jose Maria Olazabal, and Sergio Garcia from Spain, Ernie Els and Nick Price from South Africa, Jumbo Ozaki from Japan, Benard Langer from Germany, along with other players from abroad began earnestly broaching the idea of a World Golf Tour.
They solicited media mogul Robert Murdoch to underwrite an International Golf Project proposal.
The idea was met with widespread condemnation and disapproval by the rank-and-file membership of the more entrenched and established PGA Tour.
This proposal was voted down and rejected by the Tour membership.
The Worldwide Golf Tour was ahead of its time.
Nonetheless, after the PGA Tour and its Board of Directors denounced the International Golf Project Model, then PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem introduced and pushed for adopting a nearly identical concept, and The World Golf Championship concept was approved and implemented into the PGA Tour lexicon.
Two decades would pass before a new concept for a World Golf League would be introduced, and favorable opportunities presented themselves again.
In early 2020, two new versions of a worldwide Professional Tour emerged.
The first was an international Golf Coalition financed by the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia, which proposed a partnership with the European Tour, creating The Premier Golf League.
The PGA Tour immediately stepped in and preempted this proposal when the PGA Tour reached an agreement with the Euro Tour, forming a Strategic Alliance between the two entities, renaming the Europe Tour as the DP World Tour, and sharing commercial opportunities, media rights, scheduling, prize money, and playing privileges for members of both Tours.
A skillful and clever maneuver that effectively blocked any chance for a peaceful resolution to the global golf dilemma, including LIV Golf International, the other alternative for creating a World Golf Tour.
Both examples exacerbated an already acronymous situation and led us to the present-day deeper altercation between the PGA Tour and EIV Golf.
So, what came next, and what were the plans, options, and alternatives?
Some recent history.
When LIV entered its opening year of existence, it was on the precipice of failure, lacked entry into the Majors Tournaments, had lost its access to Official World Golf Rankings and points, was ostracized by the Major Professional Tours, suffered widespread condemnation and scorn from the press, ridicule from average everyday golfers, and lacked a significant television deal and broadcast package.
First, the PIF, sitting on upwards of six billion dollars in assets, promptly switched allegiance to LIV Golf with Greg Norman as CEO, soliciting numerous executives from other media and sports groups to join the new Confederation while formulating an innovative business plan, latest model, and action schedule.
Then in 2022, LIV announced a partnership agreement with the Asian Tour International, which sponsors golf tournaments in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe granting access to overseas professional tournaments for LIV members and securing those members a means of acquiring OWGR points.
The political and legal landscape changed dramatically in early 2023.
The PGA Tour, facing a potentially devasting judgment in their anti-trust suit against LIV and its members scheduled for January 2024, blinked first and backed down.
Tour Policy Board members implemented extensive and far-reaching changes to their business model and structure that corresponds to and is remarkably similar to LIV innovations, originalities, initiatives, and formats.
This partially explains the PGA Tours’ selfish and fervent recalcitrance in letting LIV Golf pilfer its players and releasing those players to participate on other tours and in different tournaments.
Both groups are now well underway with their respective seasons, with the first Major Tournament of the year, The Masters, fast approaching.
Both sides are apprehensively preparing for the increased drama surrounding the Past Champions Dinner on Tuesday night of Masters week, when all the past winners of the tournament, including members of LIV Golf, will gather socially for the first time in the same room since the altercation and split occurred over a year ago.
The occasion bodes for an electrifying and provoking evening and has sparked added interest in the upcoming event.
Other than the upcoming melodrama possibly occurring during the Masters, LIV Golf has made remarkable progress for a second-year creation, offering fourteen tournaments this 2023 season and securing a TV deal with CW Network, which will televise its events to 120 million households.
It will receive playing opportunities for all the Major Championships if players have already qualified based on those tournaments’ admission and qualification criteria.
And it also secured Official World Golf Ranking points for participating in those significant events.
An essential step toward the LIV’s acceptance and legitimacy and is vital to the public’s approval of LIV’s authenticity.
Furthermore, it is readily apparent that public perception has changed towards the new league as more information regarding the organization and its revolutionary format has been forthcoming, increasing the approval, respect, and enthusiasm for LIV as they start up and implement their innovative and ground-breaking business product and marketing objectives to the golfing public.
The most significant improvement in their public representation has been the attitude and reception of the worldwide media, which has transformed dramatically from universal negativity to grudging respect for the novel concept of LIV and its pioneering and ground-breaking innovations to the sport of Golf.
It now behooves LIV Golf as it moves forward and becomes more established and continues to grow, to become more aggressive, assertive, and proactive, redeploying quickly towards the negotiating table and initiating a conversation with the PGA Tour.
Simultaneously, LIV should persuasively seek a comprise to the existing disagreement and legal dilemma before the machinations of the suffocating and smothering legal system kick in.
When legal teams representing both interests begin investigating and seeking discovery, depositions, and testimony exposing the threat of potentially embarrassing, awkward, and discomfiting pieces of evidence and internal information emerging from the process and entering the light of day.
With possibly severe ramifications to existing legal precedent and international geopolitical relations, which could add costly and time-consuming litigation, which both sides cannot afford, allow, reveal, or make public.
Sports rivalries and disagreements should be settled on the playing fields and in conference rooms, not in law courts by lawyers, magistrates, judges, and juries.
Whose eventual outcome, settlement, and remedy will mutually benefit both parties.
At the same time, LIV should aggressively seek a partnership and business merger with the current Federation of World Golf Tours.
To include The PGA Tour in its makeup, forming an International Commission representing a consortium of the major ruling bodies of Golf and Professional Golf Tours, and creating an International World Golf Tour and Super League.
To administer, regulate, and formulate rules of conduct and procedure, developing and fusing a genuinely all-encompassing Super World Golf Tour and League with a duality of membership and a complete reorganization of the professional game, allowing the best players to play anywhere, anytime, anyplace in the world.
Professional Golf is already a multi-tiered, multi-level, and multi-faceted configuration with special, proprietary, and unique considerations and allowances for top-ranked and world-class players.
This International World Golf Organization will codify the process and administer the development while managing the activity.
LIV should furthermore initiate a complete readjustment of the corporate structure of Professional Golf allowing full commercialization of the Super League with profit and revenue sharing, income adjustments, investment opportunities, and stakeholder interests for the players rather than relying on donations and charitable contributions as the PGA Tour’s Non-profit status and corporate rules now dictates.
Think what a spectacular international series of competitions would generate with a natural start and a conclusive end to the season, centered around the Major Championships and designated tournaments of the proposed enhancements suggested by the PGA Tour.
With the best players together on one stage, in one place simultaneously, in an annual Championship, The Superbowl of Golf.
Providing a synthesis of the best Pro Golf can offer, a Hegelian philosophy of ideas resolving the conflict between union and merger, consolidation and unification, an amalgamation of the preeminent Golf talent in the world.
At the same time, Professional Golf would stop the revolt and exodus of sponsors, players, and viewership from the existing swollen production that is the PGA Tour’s stagnant, boring, and historical model.
The time is suitable for significant capitulations on behalf of the PGA Tour and a considerable shakeup of Professional Golf.
There is no reason LIV, the World Federation of PGA Tours, including The PGA Tour, cannot coexist in some future and beneficial relationship.
History is on its side, and change is going to come.
Because all sports are replete with rival leagues and competing sports genres merging and coalescing into more substantial, robust, and entertaining organizations.
The NFL and AFL merged in the ’60s, creating the Super Bowl, America’s most watched and anticipated event.
The NBA and the ABA merged in the ’70s and produced the NBA Playoffs.
The National and American League joined in 1903 and launched the World Series.
All are among the world’s most extraordinary and fabulous athletic productions.
Big-time sporting events create struggle, conflict, resolution, tradition, legacies, and memorable moments that endure in time and sports fans’ memories.
I wrote earlier about the PGA Tour not owning Golf, which is true.
They don’t, the fans do, and die-hard enthusiasts deserve a better product from Professional Golf, just not the same out-of-date, tiring, worn-out product The PGA Tour now offers golf supporters weekly.
Golf devotees warrant an improved and more entertaining creation, and LIV is structured and positioned to give that to them.
Just give LIV their chance.
Since I started this piece, the present dispute has seen significant development and movement.
Both sides have been proactive in their pursuits, but I wonder how the present upheaval will develop and accomplish as the Sport of Golf proceeds to embrace and mount the enormous platform that is the World Golf stage.
Only time will tell.
On a closing note, much deprecating and disparaging discussion and dialogue have been bandied about since the LIV began their dramatics and proposed upheaval of a competing Golf Series to rival the PGA Tour.
Catchwords like Tradition, History, Legacy, and Honor are indiscriminately tossed out, and how the defections of PGA Tour players to LIV Golf dishonored and disrespected the game of Golf with their supposed dismissal of long-standing customs, norms, and traditional values.
How LIV members had slighted those distinguished and celebrated players that came before, who fashioned and fostered the PGA Tour, made it what it is, and the time-honored legacy of Professional Golf.
Yet how soon do those modern-day players, with their massive wealth and privilege, forget the sport of Golf has a long, storied history and has undergone many transformations in structure, rules, and customs?
Golf was never meant to be, nor has it ever been, a banal practice or predictable activity.
Golf is a complex and learned skill that cannot be taught, only learned, embraced, enjoyed, and accepted for its vagaries, whims, quarks, and fancies.
It has changed over the ages and metamorphosed as technology, equipment, skill, and proficiency have evolved.
Which makes it the greatest, most challenging, engaging, and most demanding game ever conceived by man.
Golf was birthed over 400 years ago on the sunbaked fields of Edinburgh amid the gorse and thistle-populated links of Scottish shores and sprinkled amidst the inlets and estuaries that abutted the Firth of Ford.
Wind and rain, sleet and hail fashioned the barren, sparse, and sandy linkslands that spawned the sport of Golf, which the present participants on the PGA Tour now embrace, enjoin, and befit so mightily from its bounty.
The early history of Golf references Old Tom Morris, the Father of Professional Golf, who sired a son and taught him the game’s nuances, intricacies, and finer points as the sport’s first mentor and teacher.
Young Tom learned his lessons well, became the sport’s first prodigy, won four consecutive Open Championships, and is still, to this very day, the youngest Major Champion of all time.
Along the way, with his stellar play, boldness, swagger, and derring-do Young Tom became the sports’ first superstar.
He single-handedly boosted the lowly Golf Professional and his downtrodden occupation into respectability, status, and prominence on Golf’s first grand stage.
Every Golf professional who makes his living from Golf today owes Young Tom his livelihood.
Speaking of history and times gone by and LIV’s influence along with recently proposed changes to the game, lest we forget, the game of Golf originated and was exclusively a team sport.
Sides and partners competed against each other as pairs and foursomes in 4- ball, best-ball, and exclusive match-play formats.
Keeping score and the notion of par were foreign concepts not mentioned in announcing winners or losers and did not emerge for almost a half-century until the Open Championship grew expanded to other courses in Scotland and England.
Whatever you scored on a hole was meaningless until the game exploded in popularity.
When newspapers began extensive coverage of Scotland’s National Sport and commencing to record every shot and hole in the Championship Rota, printing the player’s shot totals, transforming the game into medal competitions where it remains today.
Golf, since its foundation, was always meant to be enjoyed as a team game.
When speaking of legacy, any discussion of fortitude, dedication, devotion, sacrifice, and servitude to a sport must originate from Nine-time Major Champion Gary Player.
A native of Johannesburg, South Africa, Gary Player did not have a place to play, practice, hone his skills, and have the competition he needed to improve.
So, he packed his bags and golf clubs and set out to compete anywhere in the world that had a golf course, more often than not, in the United States and Europe.
He became the world’s most-traveled athlete, winning 165 Golf tournaments worldwide and amassing fifteen million air miles.
He traversed countless continents, crisscrossed myriads of oceans, and endured forty-hour trips by plane, boat, and railroad to get to the United States for a game of Golf.
What if he did not have to?
What if he had an organization like the World Golf Tour available to him when he was younger?
Providing him the opportunity to stay home and play at courses open to him, to progress, learn, and compete with the other lads and lassies?
Let’s not forget the commitment and perseverance to describe players who sacrifice their culture and national identities to participate, travel, and play on what is mainly an American Tour.
Is it too late for the brave pioneers who sacrificed and traveled here to play during the early days of Golf?
What if they did not have to?
But then we throw out gratuitous words like legacy, history, and tradition to condemn LIV players seeking an opportunity to play Golf wherever they want and when they want.
But what if LIV can now open the rest of the world to them then?
Yes, those of us who love and honor the game of Golf respect and revere those who set the records, won the championships and made fortunes doing it.
Ben Hogans, Arnold Palmers, Jack Nicklaus, and Tiger Woods are legends, but they are not why we play Golf.
We play for the challenge, the opportunity to improve, to set goals, and realize them, or fall short, trying.
We play Golf to create opportunities to improve, develop, enjoy, and play Golf anywhere we go in the world with a patch of grass and a hole in the ground.
A Pollyanna-ash answer for sure, but isn’t that a good enough reason?
Our forefathers, mentors, teachers, and the pioneers who developed, established, and played the game for decades and centuries before we knew what a unique and special game it is.
Is that not, on some esoteric level, also the goal of LIV Golf?
To expand the frontiers that Old Tom Morris, Gary Player, and, yes, Greg Norman explored before us and paved the way to provide everyone with the opportunities to play and enjoy the game where ever they want, whenever they can,
Can we fault those visionaries who want to expand those limits and possibilities?
Jeff Waters is a PGA Master Professional and a member of the Golf Writers Association of America.
