One of the most curious parts of last week’s secretive top players’ meeting at the BMW Championship in Delaware was who was playing Robin to Tiger Woods’ Batman.
Woods, like the Dark Knight, rode in from Jupiter to host a meeting of the 20 or so top players left on the PGA Tour. Ostensibly, it seemed, it was a rallying confab to get everyone who has not yet shipped out to LIV Golf to get on the same page.
And who better than the best player of them all, for many people the man responsible for the riches elite golfers can now command?
Tiger acting for the good of the game?
"Man, I built this, and you guys are screwing it up."@AlanShipnuck on Tiger Woods' message to fellow PGA Tour members amid LIV Golf controversy pic.twitter.com/oyP9jSdCyy
— Outside The Lines (@OTLonESPN) August 21, 2022
A month on from his – for him at least – searing critique of LIV Golf at The Open at St Andrews, Tiger was being proactive for the good of the established game again.
Hey, some of us thought, here’s the great man actually taking a stance on something. And there’s nothing in it for him, either, being that he’s all but done as a player now. How great is that?
(And how naive am I? But we’ll get to that in good time.)
So in marched Tiger to Delaware. And his wingman was…Rickie Fowler.
Hold on, Rickie Fowler? The same Rickie who recently failed to qualify for the FedEx playoffs? Another staging post on his steady decline from the top ten, major contender of the early to mid 2010s? The player now 179th in the world?
But the chinese whispers are emerging about that meeting. And Fowler turns out to be the perfect symbol of what the entitled players of the moment are really up to in this fraught modern environment in golf.
Whether they’ve gone or are going to LIV or are PGA Tour ‘loyalists’.
Alan Shipnuck of the Firepit Collective had off-the-record briefings (as Phil Mickelson stupidly never stipulated with him) indicating what the meeting was about. It wasn’t a rallying call for the PGA Tour. It was to formulate plans for a new PGA Tour.
A tour within a tour
🚨#VIDEO: Tiger Woods & Rickie Fowler step off the jet in Philly. Tiger is driving to the meeting at the BMW 👀 pic.twitter.com/wXjAJi6fFo
— TWLEGION (@TWlegion) August 16, 2022
The plan is for 18 Tour events ringfenced for the top 60 only. No cuts. Guaranteed money. Equity backers – chiefly Irish billionaire JP McManus, and probably many of those who were attracted to the Premier Golf League, the forerunner of LIV – stumping up the readies.
A tour within a tour, effectively. Tiger’s role? Well, he won’t play often if at all, but having brokered the deal, there’ll be a sizeable sum in it for him.
His legacy is also secure and he becomes a de facto commissioner of the new Tour. And there’s always the satisfaction of stiffing Greg Norman (for whom his antipathy is considerable and well known).
Yeah, not quite the dark knight on the charger acting for the good of the game we hoped for.
The money is obviously a big thing for the players. The sole attraction of LIV – nobody’s really going there for the “innovations” or ‘growing the game’ – becomes less of a pull.
But one of the benefits of LIV, the creation of a safety net against failure for the current swathe of top players, is there too.
An example of what could happen
And that’s where Fowler comes in. He’s a perfect example of the former star who has fallen to the vagaries of form, a victim of the brutal side of golf’s “ecosystem”.
You know, the one that makes it different than other sports. “Jeopardy” they call it, although it’s really natural selection.
Play poorly, it doesn’t matter how many clothing deals or how much of a fan favourite you are, you’re gone.
Clearly Fowler isn’t approaching anyone’s top 60 right now. We all thought he was a certainty to go to LIV, where ‘playing well’ doesn’t actually seem to matter.
But he’s there as a perfect illustration of what could happen to the current elite. The embodiment of why they all want guaranteed money, and no cuts.
Even if that is contrary to competitive golf’s DNA. It’s the current top echelon effectively pulling up the ladder on all those young – and not so young – players battling to earn elite status, as the current crop once did.
No Saudi or Norman element, but otherwise no different
This case shows why we should shun the “sportswashing” of the Saudi regime- eg the Joshua fight and the Liv golf tour. Why would any woman feel safe visiting Saudi? https://t.co/iXJpSxKo8H
— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) August 22, 2022
The chief benefits of this new plan is it won’t have the narcissistic Norman and the puerile bells and whistles of LIV.
And it also hopefully won’t involve the Saudis, who last week jailed a woman for 34 years – after torturing her – for a few mildly critical tweets. Yeah, that ‘we’ll change them with golf’ narrative is really going well, isn’t it?
The Saudi element is still the primary reason I’m opposed to the rebel tour. But as I’ve said before in this column, I don’t care who is promoting no-cut, guaranteed-money golf.
Whether it’s brutally autocratic and murderous regimes, equity funds, established tours, ancient stars, even Tiger Woods.
It’s just not properly competitive golf. I want no part of it. But tough, because that’s clearly where we’re headed.
Bad, but not as bad as last year…
Men’s world rankings #OWGR pic.twitter.com/KTk755OMNP
— EatandSleepGolf (@EatandSleepGolf) August 16, 2022
Much pearl rattling – you suspect there will be most weeks now – when last week’s OWGR ratings for the Czech Masters and the Challenge Tour fields, when combined, didn’t match that of the corresponding Korn Ferry Tour event, the PGA Tour’s second division.
It’s indicative of where the DP World Tour stands now, we were told. Well, yes, but this is not a new thing.
If you troubled to look at the OWGR field ratings 12 months ago, you’d see the same thing happened.
Except in 2021 the ratings for the Czech Masters and that week’s Challenge Tour event (in Norway) couldn’t combine to make half of the rating for the corresponding Korn Ferry Tour tournament.
The other difference is Maximilian Kieffer on Sunday got the OWGR points his win actually merited, rather than a guaranteed 24. But as we said last week, it was utterly unreasonable that should have continued.