At its recreational level the post-covid boom is being sustained. More people are playing, ‘influencers’ are attracting dedicated followings and the latest season of a behind the scenes docu-series is about to drop on Netflix.
What’s not to like? Tiger Woods makes his latest comeback this week at Torrey Pines and we are edging ever closer to the year’s first major at a time when the four grand slam tournaments have never been stronger.
Last weekend there was action all over the globe, with an international array of golfers competing for vast sums of money.
Poland’s Adrian Meronk pocketed a cool $4m (£3.2m) for victory under the lights in LIV’s season opener in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, while Tom McKibbin’s debut yielded more than $1m in individual and team earnings for the young Northern Irishman.
What a time to be a male pro golfer.
Thomas Detry’s brilliant win at the Phoenix Open earned the Belgian $1.67m while in Qatar, the DP World Tour’s players scrapped over spoils, admittedly smaller but guaranteed by the European tour’s alliance with America.
China’s Haotong Li pocketed £341,000 for his victory, taking a big step towards gaining access to the riches of America next season, made available to the top 10 not otherwise exempt in the Race to Dubai.
Isn’t this the essence of professional golf? Creating tournaments that supply lucrative livings for the very best players in the world?
Of course it is.
And LIV, whose arrival prompted such a cash injection is off to a flier at the start of its fourth season. New chief executive Scott O’Neil is already chalking up handy victories.
A TV deal with Fox Sports in the US is a significant upgrade on the CW Network – a backwater in terms of sports broadcasting – and now the agreement with ITV means live golf is again available free-to-air in the UK.
An even bigger success is the R&A and the USGA providing formalised pathways for those competing in these 54-hole shotgun starts to qualify for The Open and US Opens.
LIV just got legit and that is a very big deal.
The game remains split, though, while creating the competitive tension that is benefitting players – just as O’Neil’s predecessor Greg Norman predicted it would.
Separate camps remain, in one corner The PGA and DP World Tours, LIV in the other; with the Masters, US PGA Championship, US Open and Open sitting in the middle.
Those four majors are the only places where we can see all of the world’s best players; Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and Rory McIlroy take on LIV recruits such as Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka.
The majors are exactly what is said on their tin and have never been more eagerly anticipated. They also show an elevated state that golf could achieve on a far more regular basis.
And this is where the leader of the free world comes in. US president Donald Trump wants unity, sees nothing wrong with doing deals with Saudi Arabia and has the power to get it sorted.
The PGA Tour has asked him to become involved in brokering a deal with the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s golf-mad governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan. They’ve been trying to thrash this out since June 2023 and every aspect has, so far, been top secret.
That is, until Trump’s involvement. He clearly wants an agreement and more importantly needs to be seen publicly as the catalyst. That’s the art of his kind of dealmaking.
Never mind that for many, the source of the next tranche of money that will pour into the sport’s bulging coffers is so contentious. Now there seems little fear that Saudi Arabia’s heavily criticised record on human rights will ever derail golf’s gravy train.
These are the good times, remember.
But golf’s future depends on people not being turned off by excessive earnings perceived as inappropriately high for what is on show.
How many people will watch LIV on Fox or ITV? Or, for that matter, the PGA Tour on the traditional golfing networks in the US and UK. Will this September’s Ryder Cup carry its usual lustre now American players are being paid to represent their country?
Will Woods and McIlroy’s TGL simulator show capture the imagination of a new golfing audience? The jury is out on that one with much to debate.
Will Netflix’s third series of Full Swing produce heroic figures around who fans can rally? Or will we be turned off by the opulence of the gilded golfing life enjoyed by the biggest stars?
And will there still be scope for the uniquely heart-warming stories that golf has always generated?
The quest to improve ‘the product’ is set to spell the end of Monday qualifiers for what will become 120 player tournaments on the PGA Tour next year.
Last week Will Chandler played his way into the Waste Management field in Arizona on the Monday and finished sixth after playing Sunday’s final round with world number one Scheffler.
These are the sort of stories that keep us dreaming. Cara Gainer’s first Ladies European Tour (LET) win is another of those – the 29-year-old Englishwoman’s play-off win in the Lalla Meryum Cup in Morocco last weekend is a much deserved breakthrough.
This week she is off to a more lucrative LET event – you guessed it – the Aramco Series event at Riyadh Golf Club in Saudi Arabia. But she will be playing for a fraction of the funds LIV’s men were fighting over.
Crisis, what crisis? You decide.
