2023 Retrospective, Part 1: LIV Golf, the PGA Tour and the Rory Freeze-Out
In the first of a two-part end of year special, a look at this year's developments at the top of the pro game. Part 2 of this retrospective will have no mention of LIV Golf. Promise!
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Happy New Year et cetera et cetera. Before 2024 rolls around, I thought it would be fun to reflect on some of the most interesting stories in the intersecting worlds of golf and business and money over the past 12 months.
And the only way that made sense to do this was to do it in two parts.
Any retrospective of 2023 that omitted developments in the ongoing LIV-PGA-PIF saga, just what they might mean for the future of golf, and by extension, the future of the business of golf, would be a poor retrospective indeed.
And yet there were so many other interesting stories to chew on from the world of golf and business and money in 2023.
So the first article here will reflect on developments at the top of the pro game this year.
The second one — which will follow, all going well, on New Year’s Eve — will steadfastly avoid LIV entirely and take a scan through several other fascinating stories that broke over the past 12 months (and which were probably overshadowed by all the LIV/PGA Tour furore).
Thank you for being here. The Wedge is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy these articles and would like to support independent media focused on the business, money and mystique of the world’s greatest game, please consider a monthly or annual subscription or gift a subscription to someone who might value this content.
LIV Golf vs PGA Tour: Towards the endgame or still just the beginning?
After the mass disruption of 2022, the past 12 months have only copper-fastened the position of the upstart new arrival to the top tier of golf’s ecosystem.
Since LIV Golf’s arrival last year there have been many predictions — or wishes — that it would be nothing more than a weird but short-lived detour in the history of the golf pro game, but by the end of 2023 it looks as if it’s here and here to stay.
Even Wyndham Clark and Brian Harmon would agree that the two biggest moments in golf in 2024 did not happen on the course. The two biggest moments happened on otherwise nondescript days of the calendar: Tuesday, June 6th and Thursday, December 7th.
In June came the shock announcement of a so-called “merger” between LIV (or more accurately its Saudi Public Investment Fund paymasters) and the PGA Tour, and then in December, the most talked about secret in sports was outed when Jon Rahm completed his move to the new tour.
(Some even drew attention to the historical significance of these dates — anniversaries of WWII’s D-Day landings in 1944 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in ‘42 — as evidence that LIV was a new war on America.)
Millions of newspaper column inches and terabyte upon terabyte of data have been used up dissecting developments in the ongoing LIV Golf-PGA Tour saga this year.
The book-length seven-part series on the saga published here in 2022 is definitely overdue an appendix or two to chart all the decisions and all the detours of the past 12 months.
There’s a good chance you’re fed up with it all, so let me try not to add to those terabytes here without adding something of value or interest.
Let’s skim over the details which have been reported a million times elsewhere, and consider what the upshot of this year’s events might be for the pro game.
There are three intriguing things about all this.
First, the undeniable swing of power and influence from the USA towards Asia.
Second, the absolute certainty that the US remains in the position of power and can be expected to fight back convincingly in 2024 and beyond.
And third: the changing place and changing face of Rory McIlroy.
Sport’s swinging pendulum of power
That swing of power has been going on for a while, especially in sports.
Allow me a Christmas-themed aside here. This week I visited the home of my niece, an eight-year-old football fanatic. She was dressed head to toe in a blue and yellow football kit I had never seen before.
I zoomed in on the crest.
Al-Nassr.
This, with Ronaldo and 7 emblazoned on the back, was one of her prize gifts from Santa Claus.
A few hours later, I opened up the Flashscore app on my phone to check for some latest scores. I hit the search button, and a list of “Most Popular Searches” appeared.
At the top?
You guessed it.
Al-Nassr.
And this is not all about Cristiano Ronaldo taking the end-of-career big bucks in the desert kingdom.
In the summer of 2023, the one undeniable trend in pro football was so many of football’s established superstars — many of them still a few years away from the retirement home — accepting obscene riches to go to Saudi Arabia.
Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino and Jordan Henderson (aged just 31, 32 and 33 respectively) all arrived there from Liverpool. Neymar, once a rival to Ronaldo and Leo Messi as world’s top player, joined Al-Hilal. World Cup winner Karim Benzema and five-time Premier League champion Aymeric Laporte also made the Saudi move. Completing Saudi’s great year in football, in December the FIFA Club World Cup final took place there for the first time, Manchester City defeating Fluminense of Brazil.
Elsewhere in sport, Formula 1 and boxing have been lapping up the petrodollars for many years, and both arrived in Saudi Arabia to much fanfare in 2023.
Sergio Perez took a rare race victory away from teammate Max Verstappen in March, while three of the year’s highest-profile boxing cards took place there: Tyson Fury and Francis Ngannou in a boxing-UFC crossover bout, the double-header featuring former heavyweight champs Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder and the YouTuber Jake Paul against Tommy Fury.
The F1 might be a meaningful event but the boxing bouts were as high on attention as they were low on actual significance: a bit like LIV Golf, the year’s Saudi paid-for boxing matches held a sort of grotesque appeal.
It’s sport, but not as you know it.
A bit like a car-crash on the motorway that makes you complain about the traffic build-up, even as you slow down and rubberneck with all the rest.
America’s position at the center of it all
Despite all this upheaval in the world, the US position at the center of things will be assured for a long time to come yet.
Why?
Let’s take our minds off the specifics of sport and hover for a moment at 50,000 feet.
America as de facto world leader: America has effectively run the world since 1945. And, to be quite frank, America has run the world quite effectively since 1945. Compared with the events of the first half of the 20th century, the past 75 years or so have been more peaceful and more prosperous for more people than any comparable timeframe in history.
The double-edged swords of war and finance, America’s two enriching but destabilizing forces: First, Dwight D. Eisenhower identified the military-industrial complex in his famous speech towards the end of his presidency in 1960. That phenomenon has gone from strength to strength ever since, through multiple wars that have been as profitable for big industry and its beneficiaries as they have been devastating to small communities and many cities far away from American soil. As rubble continues to pile up in Ukraine and Gaza, military-industrial interests look to have plenty of miles in the tank yet. And second, the financialization of almost everything over the past 50 years (since the decision of Richard Nixon to take America off the Gold Standard in 1971) has created a money industry that has powered great growth at the same time as it has increased underlying instability. Those who complain about the avalanche of debt miss the mountains those debts have built. No debt, no avalanche, but no mountain. (To switch metaphors, the explosion in the finance industry has been like a rapidly built gleaming skyscraper that could have done with some more attention to the dirty, unglamorous work of securing its foundations. But without finance and debt, there would be no gleaming skyscraper and no glory.) War and finance are two double-edged swords, and America has been swinging them gleefully for more than 50 years.
Boom-bust cycles and the 2020s: The events of 1987’s Black Monday, 2001’s Dot-com Crash and 2008’s Great Financial Crisis are still fresh in the memory for many who went through the busts, recessions and depressions that resulted, and those who did will always and forever be on the lookout for the next cataclysm. So there’s no shortage of observers around the world who have looked at the events of 2020-23 — Covid-19, the global response of mass money-printing and increased state surveillance, double-digit inflation and rapidly rising interest rates, new wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, supply chain fragility, the spectacular rise of artificial intelligence (at least in writing blog posts and workable code) and the climate Doomsday clock — and decided they possess all the ingredients for a spectacular collapse. Some (among them billionaire libertarians, gold hoarders, end-of-the-world preppers and Bitcoin maximalists) believe that the powder-keg for a full system reset is ready and just needs a final spark. But there’s another view that says something different. It says that even if we are entering another bust, the surest bet is that the cycle of decay, regeneration and growth, powered by technology advancements that show no signs of slowing down, will only continue. The Techno-Optimists might be many things, but they’re not naive.
The one thing any of us can say with any certainty about all this is:
No matter where in the world you are and no matter what you think about America, the US has been the driving force in all the upheaval and all the progress, playing a central role in all of the above and almost everything else of note that has happened in all of our lifetimes.
Yes, non-western influences have been rising — China and Saudi Arabia in business, but also Russia in energy, Iran as an increasingly powerful main player in the Middle East and Brazil as South America’s globally-focused behemoth.
But is there anyone who truly believes that America will finally be squeezed out?
Maybe, but such empire shifts take decades or centuries to play out.
Back to the matter at hand, and what this means for golf in general, and the big business of pro golf in particular.
Even though it sent shockwaves through the media (about which lots more to come in Part 2 of this 2023 retrospective), the fact that the PGA Tour leadership was willing to set aside its misguided moralizing and strike the basis of a deal with the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia in June should really have been no surprise to anyone who pays close attention to the way things in the real world actually work.
In the real world, money talks and money walks.
Golf’s New World Order might be more global in reach and influence than it has ever been before, and America’s position of authority within that might have been diluted.
But whatever about the detail of who will be signing Jon Rahm’s checks from now on, the smart money goes on expecting America to continue to be at the front and center.
Because America is the home of The Deal.
All the MAGA noise about immigration and isolationism misses the fact that where there are deals to be struck, the USA will always be there to strike them.
There’s just too much money ready to change hands, and in a global financial system where devalued currencies are increasingly the norm, the dollar is still the one thing wanted by everyone, everywhere.
As one Argentinian I spoke to recently said, “You come to my country with dollars, you are king!”
In the future, American business interests may control a smaller slice of golf’s pie, but there’s every chance that when the dust settles on the upheaval and disruption of 2022-23, golf’s pie is about to get much, much bigger.
Rory McIlroy’s new reality
If you ever can feel sorry for someone with a net worth estimated at £200m (according to the Sunday Times 2023 Rich List), then Rory McIlroy might be that person.
For a whole year, McIlroy was put forward by his erstwhile mates in the PGA Tour’s corridors of power as the Appointed Spokesman for All That is Good and Fair.
He criticized fellow pros who signed on with LIV for their greed, said it was “hard to stomach” playing in the same field as LIV pros, drew attention to the questionable morality of the Saudis, and admitted that his own place at the center of the whole affair “took time away from the two things that are most important to me which are family and golf”.
And then came that June 6th announcement that the PGA Tour — whose chief executive Jay Monahan had, lest anyone ever forget, played the 9/11 card in opposing Saudi influence in 2022 — was now getting into bed with the same Saudis.
McIlroy was a one-man finger in the dike for the PGA Tour against LIV, so one might have expected him to be involved in such consequential discussions?
No.
Rory heard about the deal the night before it was announced.
Rory’s demeanor for the rest of 2023 was striking.
No more was he a spokesperson for anyone except Rory McIlroy.
In November, he stepped down from the PGA Tour’s policy board more than a year before his term was due to end, in effect removing himself from all such influence. A year previously, that decision would have been unthinkable.
And then in December, after Rahm’s move to LIV had been finalized, McIlroy’s stance on Ryder Cup eligibility had completed a 180-degree turn.
A couple of months previously, referencing the absence of Ryder Cup stalwarts such as Sergio Garcia, Paul Casey and Ian Poulter from the Europe team in Rome, McIlroy said, “They’re going to miss being here more than we’re missing them.”
But after Rahm’s move it was all changed:
“Jon is going to be in Bethpage [for the Ryder Cup] in 2025 so. Because of this decision, the European Tour are going to have to rewrite the rules for the Ryder Cup eligibility. There’s absolutely no question about that … I certainly want Jon Rahm on the next Ryder Cup team.”
This change in McIlroy’s position — from primary spokesperson in defense of the PGA Tour to unattached outsider, maybe in time even lone wolf — was one of the biggest surprises of 2023.
Rory McIlroy was burned and spurned by the PGA Tour’s leadership. That will hurt his ego grievously, but it may also spur him to greater focus on the things that made him great in the first place.
Rory is a complex individual, his complexity running deep in the history of his homeland where he has at different times been both a symbol of Ireland’s punchy global ambition and its 500-year-old history of religious schisms.
In the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio De Janeiro, where golf made its return after more than a century in the wilderness, McIlroy was repeatedly questioned about which country he was going to represent: as a Northern Irishman, he could have chosen Ireland or Great Britain, and either decision was dripping in political meaning.
After much soul-searching, and even questioning whether golf deserved to be in the Games, he opted for Ireland, but there was a palpable sense of relief from his camp when he later withdrew, blaming the spread of the Zika virus in Brazil.
All this is to say that Rory McIlroy has long made a habit of placing the weight of the world on his shoulders.
In 2024, maybe for the first time in more than a decade, he will have nothing or nobody to care about but himself.
It will be interesting to see how that affects his game.
If there’s a positive uplift in performance, we could yet see the second peak of a career that has, paradoxically, made him a global superstar while still feeling like one giant underachievement.
Thank you for being here. The Wedge is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy these articles and would like to support independent media focused on the business, money and mystique of the world’s greatest game, please consider a monthly or annual subscription or gift a subscription to someone who might value this content.