Whatever else LIV Golf accomplished — splitting the sport of golf in two, making players a whole lot richer, bringing the game to underserved global outposts, claiming generational players in some of their prime years — there are two undeniable lessons to learn from its impending “transition.”
First: Money can’t buy legacy. Second: It’s clearly impossible now to create a viable alternative sports league in America.
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Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, which controls sums approaching a trillion dollars, invested in LIV something on the order of $5 billion over the first four-plus years of the tour’s life. That was enough to buy the services of some of the best players on the planet, major-winning guys like Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau and Brooks Koepka. It was enough to throw lavish tournaments all over the world, spectacles with branding and music that — in a couple locales, at least — did draw significant fan interest.
But all the money in the world — which is functionally what the PIF is — can’t buy history, and that’s the foundation of golf, and sport more generally.
No true golf fan cares whether Rahm made $300 million or $400 million by jumping to LIV just months after pledging his “fealty” to the PGA Tour. Instead, they care that Rahm has two majors, neither of which came as a member of LIV. They want to see Rahm and DeChambeau going head-to-head against Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy, which currently only happens in the majors. They appreciate the long, unbroken line of historical legacy that runs from Bobby Jones to Byron Nelson to Sam Snead to Arnold Palmer to Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods. They value the fact that today’s players can walk the exact same fairways, putt on the exact same greens as legends did decades and centuries before them.
LIV’s disruptive strategy never really addressed the historical aspect of golf. LIV officials either thought they could just throw around enough money — see: former LIV chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan’s desire for membership in Augusta National — or drown out legacy talk with the pulsing club music that runs during LIV tournaments.
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Neither approach worked. You don’t create legacy in a year, and you damn sure can’t buy your way into Augusta National Golf Club.
Ironically, the volume-above-history approach has led to LIV’s most successful endeavors — the events in golf-starved South Africa and Australia, which each drew more than 100,000 fans to their most recent events. That points to a path forward for LIV — a severely downsized one, yes, but a path nonetheless.
Golf as it’s now constituted is virtually entirely America-centric, with three of the four majors contested in the United States and the PGA Tour holding a preeminent position in the game. (The Tour, having weathered the LIV assault, is restructuring its own operations but remains the game’s guiding force.) That means there’s significant opportunity for global expansion, opportunity that LIV was just beginning to access.
Back in America, though, there’s another lesson to draw here. LIV’s impending realignment — we’ll be polite and use that term — also means there is now literally no chance that an upstart league can challenge any American sports institution. Absent the total incompetence or criminal mismanagement of a legacy league, what we have now — NFL, MLB, NBA, WNBA, NHL, PGA Tour, NASCAR — is what our grandchildren will have, too.
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Yes, there are always attempts at carving out little chunks of the big dogs’ turf — think, say, Savannah Bananas or Unrivaled. And someone will try to start a new spring football league every couple decades or so until the sun burns out. But a full-on from-scratch sports league supplanting, outpacing or absorbing a legacy one? Not happening.
LIV came closer to upending the state of its sport than any upstart league in the last half-century. The PGA Tour has radically redesigned its business model and payout structure thanks to LIV’s influence. But even with several of the game’s biggest stars and a functionally limitless funding pipeline as a head start, LIV wasn’t able to throw a serious scare into the PGA Tour for more than a few months. What hope does that give for every other would-be revolutionary sports league, which won’t have access to world-tilting wealth for its operations?
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Maybe, just maybe, if LIV had managed to lure Tiger Woods or Rory McIlroy, this would be a different conversation. But probably not. The sports world is too entrenched in its traditional form to allow for any new upstarts to garner more than just cursory attention.
One of LIV’s early slogans was “Golf, but louder.” That didn’t age well. Turns out what golf fans really want is the same thing they’ve always wanted … golf. No need to turn up the volume when the fans are already listening.