How professional golf arrived at its breaking point

This is a fascinating story. The PGA has done a terrible job of keeping players happy, and now they’re facing big money competition and banking on morals to hold players back from jumping ship. It’s worth noting that most of the guys who switched this season are either irrelevant, on the tail end of their careers, or controversial/disliked on the tour, so they don’t have a ton to lose. It’ll be interesting to see next season if we see big name “squeaky clean” players jump ship after the “villains” take the bad press this year.

The leaders of the PGA and the LIV should study, in detail, the rift in American open wheel racing in the mid-1990's to ensure that they do not repeat the same mistakes. The split in IndyCar racing took it from nearly competing with Formula 1 for prestige and audience to nearly going out of business, racing to empty stands. The sports, obviously, are extremely different from each other, but on a business level are somewhat similar. They're both based on weekend-long events that travel from one location to the next, feature a tournament/race between individual players who are all competing with each other to capture a portion of a prize pool, and have superficially similar models w.r.t. marketing, attendance and logistics.

I love discovering things like this. I don&#x27;t keep up with golf. I couldn&#x27;t name 5 professional golfers off the top of my head. And the others, like Mickelson, I&#x27;d only recognize the name once it was brought up.<p>And then all of a sudden I find out that the PGA is essentially fractured and a competing league is coming up and it&#x27;s nine kinds of high school drama.<p>It makes me realize just how much we all miss just going through our lives, even if we try to keep relatively informed.

Haven&#x27;t lots of sports gone through competing leagues&#x2F;tours on the professional level? And I&#x27;m pretty certain there was money involved too, and not just pure love for their sports.

I don&#x27;t know much about pro golf and haven&#x27;t been following this story closely. Since it seems like at least the PGA side is appealing to fair play and morals and accusing the LIV players of chasing money, I&#x27;m curious: how much of the money generated on the PGA tour is actually paid out to players in the form of prizes, appearance fees, etc. In short, is this a situation where the PGA tour organization is capturing billions generated by the players and blowing it all on executive projects and phony &quot;charities&quot;? Or are player payouts pretty large already, and the LIV tour&#x27;s ability to pay more just down to the sovereign wealth fund and the &quot;innovations&quot; just a nicer way to say &quot;better monetization of events, more ads, wringing more money from TV networks&quot;?

I find the whole situation sad. I’ll admit the PGA tour was slow to change, but it is sad that Norman and his Saudi oil barons get to create the disruption. Crazy how Mickelson was king of the PGA a year ago and has a tarnished legacy today. I really don’t see this improving the game of golf.

The PGA TOUR is in a precarious position. It does not run, or control, any of the 4 major tournaments -- Masters (Augusta National), US Open (USGA), Open Championship (Royal &amp; Ancient) or even, ironically, the PGA Championship (PGA of America, a different entity than PGA TOUR). PGA can continue to run relatively meaningless events (Valspar Open, Honda Classic, etc) but the game has concentrated around the majors (same as tennis&#x27;s Grand Slam events) and PGA TOUR has no ability to keep the LIV players out of the majors.

Related: WSJ&#x27;s &quot;The Journal&quot; podcast did a good episode about this just yesterday:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;the-journal&#x2F;the-saudi-money-splitting-golf&#x2F;0aa77e41-4707-4769-a62c-89d8b26b881a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;podcasts&#x2F;the-journal&#x2F;the-saudi-money-spl...</a>

&gt; I think the only way the Saudi government cleanses itself is by becoming one that cares about human rights. Buying players to play on teams in funny tournaments isn&#x27;t going to work. They&#x27;re going to lose interest.&quot;<p>Then again, money and resources go a long way towards getting people not to think about morals. Witness President Biden’s upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia, even though he had earlier declared them a pariah nation for the murder of Kashogi.

Mickleson must be under a lot of stress, in the video his eyes are yellowish and he looks very sweaty.

I was hoping this would be about the entire business model imploding since golf has no place in the modern era. We need to be using land for important things like food and re-wilding to preventing climate collapse and mass species extinctions.

This article seems to be written assuming that you already know how professional golf reached its breaking point. With no pre-existing knowledge of the subject all I got from it was that there&#x27;s apparently some sort of dispute between the PGA Tour and LIV golf (which I&#x27;ve never heard of before) and for whatever reason someone named Phil Mickelson is seen as a centerpiece of this dispute. Apparently LIV is paying the golfers more? It isn&#x27;t clear to me from reading just this article why that&#x27;s a problem or what the big deal is.