I have been waiting for this tweet for four years. When I finally gave up on trying to predict what would happen, it finally arrived.
And of course, the jokes were off the charts.
And it is now official.
I’m calling it.
LIV Golf …
More on LIV’s ending below along with some unintended … benefits (?) for former players.
Name drops today: Big Timi, Ralph Guldahl, Davis Lamb, the coefficient of friction, the NYT crossword and 1980s Euro Tour.
Today’s newsletter is presented by Cobra.
And while this is not what I’ll be talking about today, I’m grateful to all of our sponsors for the support we have from them, which allows us to work on side projects during downtime in the fall (see Cobra image below). That is a huge gift.
What I do want to talk about today is the Cobra OPTM driver, which may cause either highly addictive accuracy or dangerous levels of stability … or possibly even both.
I chuckle at the highly addictive accuracy thing because it leads me to thinking about what an alien would say I’m addicted to in my game …
• Swinging as hard as humanly possible.
• Digging the edge into the ground from 30 yards and in.
• Leaving putts 15 feet short.
Aspirationally, though, I am looking for a way to be highly addicted to a more accurate off-the-tee game, though, and the OPTM driver is my weapon of choice to get there.
You can (and should) check it out right here.
And now, onto the news.
1. As many of you know, I have recently been getting steep on a history of golf project. Like Viktor downswing steep. Anyway, because of this, I have been viewing the LIV news through a bit of a different lens than I maybe normally would.
What’s maybe most interesting to me is that in 50 (or probably even 10) years, people will view LIV Golf as this little blip in the professional golf world — a literal footnote in media guides and on Wikipedia — and completely forget (or not even understand to begin with) how much it shaped the rest of the golf world.
Twitter will be amusing for the next few weeks. There will be (and are) real questions about Bryson’s future. But the downstream effects of LIV will also be felt for decades.
Which is wild to think about now because in decades, most people won’t connect the dots between Phil Mickelson’s NFT fascination and the fact that Miles Russell and Jackson Koivun are playing 36 holes of match play at Sand Valley for $10 million in August of 2037.
[Jason here] All of this has me looking at the early days of Normal Sport thinking, "What an interesting time to start illustrating golf.”
2. The through line of LIV for me is arrogance. This lack of understanding that you cannot microwave history just by throwing money and names at projects. The amusing part here is that I think LIV legitimately could have become the best golf tour in the world. The PGA Tour was begging to be upended. Begging!
And instead of putting the (ball) frog in the pot of water and slowly boiling it before the frog realizes what’s happening, LIV tried to turn the temperature up to 212 (that’s 100 for those not in the United States) from day one, which is almost always a bad plan.
There are other instances of this pervasive pride.
And for me, that was the easiest thing to sniff out from the very first iteration of this (I cannot believe I’m saying this) now-defunct league.
3. This is easy for Rory — a probable (already?) billionaire — to say, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
You know, there's not as much of an arms race as there was maybe a couple of years ago, and some players will argue that that's not good for players because -- but I think that's very short-term thinking. Like, if you want sustainable tours, and we want these tours object around in 50 years' time, there has to be sustainable business practices in place to make sure they are around in 50 years' time.
Rory McIlroy
LIV kept creating these situations in which what was good for the individuals was bad for the whole, and the fact that it’s gone means that Patrick Cantlay is probably not going to make as much money as he would have — although the damage has mostly already been done on a purse increase standpoint so it will likely be close — but I care very little about how much Patrick Cantlay makes and much more about whether the Western Open (BMW Champ.) is still around in 50 years.
4. The part about LIV ending that I’m most excited about is the reabsorption of Jon Rahm into a real professional golf world. I still believe he’s generationally good, but we’re going to find out if that’s true over the next few years. The other part of LIV ending that I started thinking about came after this quote from Rahm.
As of right now, I really don't know what 2027 is going to look like for me, right. So I have yet to have a discussion with the PGA Tour to see if there's any path back for next year. So I don't know, as of right now. Until I get clarity on that, yeah, my plan would be to spend the year on the DP World Tour, and I'm looking forward to it. Currently looking at the schedule to see how I can organize it to play the events I want to play. You know, maybe have a chance to have a bit of a different year to what I have in the past.
Jon Rahm
What this got me thinking about was whether the Euro Tour was about to make a comeback. What if Rahm just decides to post up there for the next 20 years and Rory kind of does as well, and what if the ultimate outcome of LIV is that it re-strengthened the Euro Tour to its mid-1980s heydays when it was arguably much closer to the PGA Tour as an overall product? How amusing (funny? ironic?) would that be?
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,050 of them) and includes a closer look at the project I’ve been working on, some thoughts on that Rory penalty and something I could use some help on …
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