We Gave Them A Chance To LIV. Now, Just Let ‘Em Die

NOTE: This musing also appears today on our sister site Leblanguage.  Please visit it regularly for coverage of media, sports, politics and life.

I’ve been there for the births of the American Basketball Association, the World Hockey Association, the World Football League, two versions of the United States Football League and two versions of the XFL.  Their lofty goals, their noisy purgings of established talent from incumbent competitors, their often outrageous attempts to become significant in the eyes and hearts of far less ardent fans than moi.

I’ve also been there for their financial missteps, their dizzying franchise pivots, their eventually irrelevant TV ratings and ultimately their deserved demises.  Some of them saved some face with absorption, much like the American Football League of the 1960s helped birth the behemoth that today’s NFL is.  Far more went the way of the American Basketball League–otherwise known as the first professional organization that gave George Steinbrenner a franchise and the home of the throughly forgotten New York Tuck Tapers.

I’ve always supported the underdogs and the upstarts, feeling I am the epitome of one myself.  I’ve celebrated them and paid them attention amidst their struggles.  But I’m also a realist who knows that if the execution is marginal and the demand really was never there to begin with they really didn’t deserve the chance that they got in the first place.

Such are my thoughts surrounding what increasingly appears will be the latest headstone in the cemetary of mission statements gone bad that arose this week surronding the LIV Golf Tour.   As they so often are, YAHOO! SPORTS’ pair of Jays–Hart and Busbee–were among the newsbreakers:

Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund is on the verge of cutting funding for LIV Golf, according to the Financial Times, a blow that would potentially — if not certainly — put an end to the breakaway tour…Late Tuesday evening, a social media report put the golf world on notice that something was brewing about the future of LIV Golf.

Immediately, speculation ran rampant that the breakaway Saudi-backed tour might be abruptly shutting its doors. And why not? Despite the deep pockets of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the now 4-year-old tour is still struggling to find much traction. Television ratings are non-existent, the tour hasn’t signed a marquee player since Jon Rahm three years ago and the proposed union with the PGA Tour has never materialized.

But Wednesday morning, as more speculation surfaced, LIV Golf presented a business-as-usual front, at least publicly, that included social media posts about upcoming tee times for this week’s event in Mexico City, as well as media availability ahead of the tournament, which is scheduled to begin Thursday.

THE ATHLETIC’s Gregg Evans and Chris Waugh gave this propaganda in a recap filed last night:

LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil struck a defiant tone on Thursday, arguing that the league is “really excited about where we are” amid reporting that its original funding source is preparing to pull its investment.

O’Neil spoke to Arlo White, part of LIV’s in-house broadcasting team, in a prerecorded segment that aired during television coverage of its first-round event in Mexico City.

“This notion of, do you have to raise money? Probably. Like, this is business, you know? But if we keep the trajectory going the way we are, and the revenue growth going, this is going to be a really good business for a really long time,” O’Neil told White.

Yet their colleague Chris Branch immediately threw c0ld water on that in his daily recap that dropped earlier this morning:

What this credibly reflects is a public openly rooting against a tour defined by a populus of opportunists already seen as being  more than decently compensated and a regime dominated by an agenda of sportswashing,.  LIV has been never been seen with quite the level of sympathy and encouragement that the ventures I lamented about above came onto their respective scenes with.  We mused at length about that when a truce of sorts emerged in the summer of 2023.

But as noted above none of the anticipated olive branches emerged.  Instead, as SPORTS ILLUSTRATED’s Bob Harig noted in a self-questioning piece he authored yesterday, we’ve seen a slow trickle of retrenchment and puppies coming back home with tails between their legs:

The PGA Tour created a “Returning Member Program” for four major champions to come back, which Brooks Koepka accepted while Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Cameron Smith did not. If LIV Golf folded, would those three still be welcomed back fairly quickly? Would any other LIV players be of interest to the Tour immediately?

BH: The sense is that they would be treated as Koepka was, with a financial penalty, the inability to play in signature events unless they qualify, and be denied FedEx Cup bonus money and player equity for five years.

Who else? Tyrrell Hatton, who just tied for third at the Masters, comes to mind. There are other young players such as Thomas Detry and Tom McKibbin and Elvis Smylie whom the Tour should embrace. But those players will need to find a way onto the Tour via some sort of qualifying system. The Tour will stick to its exemption system.

And as the Jays further eluclidated, a reality check may very well prompt those outliers to soon follow suit:

Early Wednesday, longtime golf reporter Alan Shipnuck floated a possible explanation:

Given the contracts LIV is under, including with players like Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau, as well as venues, vendors, sponsors, media outlets and every other entity it takes to run a professional sporting league, using the war in Iran to pull the plug on something you’ve already been considering pulling the plug on actually makes sense. The report also comes, coincidentally or not, on the same day the PIF outlined it’s future investment prerogatives, none of which mentioned golf or sport.

Connecting all of these dots may very well explain the sentiment that Branch exposed.  They seem to be believing Scott O’Neil as much as Scott Bessent.

And that may be why I’m not shedding any tears for this league’s impending demise.  The connections between it and the current White House adminstration are undeniable.  DeChambeau and Johnson are staunch Trump supporters.  The tour, unlike the PGA, has provided his clubs with numerous key events; the next is scheduled for his Washington, D.C. venue over Mother’s Day weekend.   And it will air live on FOX Sports, quell surprise.  Whose patriarch David Hill was retained by the tour at its outset and indeed set up that TV deal, defiantly defending doing any business at all with the Saudis, noting at the time that it was all but necessary to assure that the sport itself could survive.  GOLF’s James Coogan regurgitated Hilly’s spin in a July 2022 piece:

“How long do we have? Here’s the horrendous truth about golf,” Hill told “The Ourand and Marchand Sports Media Podcast” earlier this week. “The last figures I saw about golf, 50 percent of the television audience was 65+, which means they’re dead in 25 years. Seventy-eight percent was 50+. So what does that tell you? The audience is dying.”

Well that audience comp hasn’t changed much over time.  You’re not seeing Hill being quoted in this latest turn of events.  And that D.C. event will be airing its first three rounds on the FOX One app and on FOX BUSINESS NETWORK–not even FS1, let alone FOX.  What does that tell you?

It tells me that all of the hoopla and projected change has never truly materialized.  If anything, the advent of TGL and ESPN–which aired exclusively on non-tour nights primarily during the dead of winter–have provided the sort of alternative and additive appeal to the sport that were initially promised.  Not conducting events in the same cities and at the same time as the PGA.

Which brings to mind how the first USFL accelerated its own demise–being driven by the hype and ego of the owner of its New York area franchise to go directly after the NFL and shift from spring to fall.  And you do remember who that stable genius was, no?  The one that indeed won his case but was rewarded with trebled remunerations that totaled THREE DOLLARS.  And that fall season was never played, nor were any further games in that incarnation.

Sure looks like LIV is headed for the same fate. For many of the same sorts of reasons.  So I’ll do little more than provide a link to USA TODAY’s otherwise normal coverage of this weekend’s Mexico City event.  Even I have only so much patience and bandwidth for upstarts.

Courage…