Golf Fans Always Lose

While speaking with media on Tuesday, International Presidents Cup Captain Mike Weir announced that there would be no LIV players in this year’s edition. This is tough news for the International side, which has historically played at a talent disadvantage. They have the 0-12-1 record to prove it, too.

That deficit had been tightening in recent years, and at Royal Melbourne in 2019 the International team almost pulled off a remarkable upset thanks to their budding young talent. Unfortunately, many of the bright stars from that edition have sold their talents (some would say souls) to LIV Golf. That’s a non-starter for competing in the Presidents Cup, which is owned and organized by the PGA Tour.

We have entered the stage of the LIV/PGA Tour war where each side is playing a full deck’s worth of victim cards. Lost in all this is the fact that the true victim here isn’t any player, or even either of the two sparring tours as a whole. The people suffering are those who consume the product, the only party involved without a voice at the table: the fans. The sport has never been so diluted, with two tours providing mediocre products while actively seeking to divide golf’s fan base into one camp or the other. And all the while the self-proclaimed “victims” are getting paid more money for less work than at any point in the sport’s history, financials completely divorced from the fact that general fan interest is plummeting.

There comes a moment in every fight where both sides look at themselves and realize nobody is winning. I feel we are at that point. Any hope for reconciliation will require one of the two sides to extend an olive branch. I fear that the leaders on both sides are far from that point, instead remaining more concerned about how to secure tens of millions of more dollars from the future wealth of the game while turning off thousands of fans in the present.

The Presidents Cup would without a doubt be more compelling for fans if LIV stars like Cameron Smith and Joaquin Niemann were playing. At some point, “making the product better for fans” has to become the guiding focus for people in power. I don’t have faith in LIV ever presenting themselves as the pragmatic organization, which leaves it up to the PGA Tour’s current Policy Board to care about something more important than hurt feelings or their personal finances. Someone has to think about the future of the game before it’s too late.

This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.