Four reasons to be at the London Invitational

Why I'm braving the horrors of Ryanair to be at Centurion Club tomorrow

It’s here. Like it or not, LIV Golf is going ahead in ‘London’ this weekend.

I’ve put the British capital in quote marks because claiming Centurion Club is located there is a stretch. I know this because I’m flying to Stansted Airport (also definitely not in London) tomorrow morning early – and I can’t take a Tube or ever a double-decker red bus to the course. Why? Because Centurion is beyond the city and its network!

But never mind my transport travails. There’s a tournament happening. An event that may prove pivotal in setting the direction professional golf takes going forward. And here are four reasons why I’m making the effort to join Dustin Johnson & company at the London Invitational.

History may show this was a turning point

If you’re PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan or European Tour CEO Keith Pelley, you might be spending the weekend hiding under the bed and pretending the London Invitational isn’t taking place at all. But if, like me, you’re a neutral in all this, you’re going to want to be there – or tune in at the very least. Only a fool would miss out on what we might look back on as the dawn of a new era.

It might even be the start of a long-overdue world golf tour. You can slag the field all you like, but just a little glance at the history of sports tells you that today’s ‘rebels’ can often turn out to be tomorrow’s establishment. For a deeper dive into how ‘rebellions’ have played out in various sports in the past, check out this article I wrote earlier in the year.

Heck, let’s not forget that golf professionals were viewed as second-class citizens once upon a time. Long before they had any tours at all, they were actually banned from entering clubhouses. The ‘establishment’ thought they were unprincipled money-grabbers with no respect for the sport, you see. Sound familiar? Yet today’s pros get VIP parking, free lunch and adulation aplenty. These things can flip 180 degrees faster than you think.

Given the context, I think the London Invitational field is not to be sniffed at. Sure, it might not be a ‘proper golf tournament’ (I’m paraphrasing Rory McIlroy) from a depth point of view, but we’ve got to remember that’s entirely normal for the first event of a ‘breakaway’ series. And never mind Phil Mickelson – Dustin Johnson taking the plunge at the peak of his career is already a massive win for LIV Golf. His resignation from the PGA Tour, which he revealed to media yesterday, is going to get a lot of other elite players thinking.

When it comes to issues like being barred from the Ryder Cup, Johnson is banking on the rules changing down the line. And the more top players do the same, the more inevitable it becomes that the rules will have to change. Which, in turn, would make it easier for even more players to follow the likes of Johnson. It’s easy to see how quickly this thing could snowball.

Against this backdrop, I’m very curious to feel the vibe at Centurion. I want to sniff the air. And you can’t do that on YouTube.

Something new

Professional golf has spent decades failing to learn from the success of the Ryder Cup. It has continued to insist on long, laborious, 72-hole strokeplay events as standard. Sure, this is considered the best examination of who is the best player. That’s why it should continue to be the format for Majors.

But all those other dozens of tournaments played around the globe, pretty much 52 weeks a year? The occasional experiment aside, they’ve mostly plodded through their four rounds in time-honoured fashion. They’ve made themselves a little riper for disruption, if you ask me.

Greg Norman and his gang are doing just that in terms of format.

Okay, 54 holes, a shotgun start and a Saturday finish isn’t exactly a case of tearing up the script. You can argue they could have gone further: matchplay, scrambles, nominated players hitting only drives, chips or putts. If there’s no cut and everyone gets paid, then players have less reason to worry about whether it’s a true meritocracy or not. Entertainment becomes more valid as a priority.

(That said, Dustin Johnson did make a good point about the fairness involved in a shotgun start in yesterday’s presser: “We are all playing the same exact time, same exact conditions. So it's going to be a really true test and whoever wins, there's no, well, maybe if I would have teed off early on the first day, I might have won the golf tournament.”)

The team thing is good in principle, though the four-man squads have a lot of randomness about them (having a ‘draft’ does little to alter that, though you can see how it might as this evolves), which I suppose explains the unbearably silly names. Here’s hoping there can be national/regional squads in future. Or, how about Team Callaway versus Team Ping? Anything to provide a sense of belonging for all concerned. And wouldn’t getting women involved have added a whole new dynamic to those teams – not to mention some much-needed positive PR for supposedly forward-thinking Saudi Arabia?

But we must remember that this is effectively a pilot event. This has been put together in a frenetic hurry. The priority has been to get players on board – and too wacky a format might have made them think twice.

There will be learnings and there will be change. If we still have LIV Golf in a couple of years, I’m certain that format will look different; no doubt bolder. Nobody ever said this thing is set in stone.

Stinger GC

There, I used one of the silly team names.

All four players are South African. But you wouldn’t know it, would you?

I’ll state the obvious here: it would be easier to raise a pulse for a team of my countrymen if it was playing under the South African flag. Hopefully, that will be an option going forward.

But that’s on the side. I’m particularly interested in the side featuring Louis Oosthuizen, Branden Grace and Charl Schwartzel because I’ve covered some of their finest moments as a journalist.

Shortly before he became an Open champion, I played a round with Louis at the rough-and-ready nine-hole course where he grew up in South Africa. I wrote about the oil/sand greens and prickly fairways of Albertinia Golf Club for Golf Punk magazine, of which I was then editor. This formed the basis of a Golf World cover story that had to be delivered in a hurry following the relative unknown’s triumph at the Old Course.

Around the same time, I also picked out a fresh-faced Grace for a Golf Punk feature. You can read that interview here.

Meanwhile, Schwartzel couldn’t stop winning co-sanctioned European/Sunshine Tour events in South Africa. Filing for Reuters and SuperSport, I walked many a hole with him and scribbled my way through a fair share of his press briefings.

These guys are flipping a page on their careers now. While the charge that they are past their best might be reasonable – Oosthuizen said yesterday that he was about to semi-retire to his farm anyway – it’s worth remembering that both the Oosthuizen and Schwartzel names have been prominent on leaderboards over the last six Majors.

Making up the quartet, incidentally, is the lesser-known Hennie du Plessis. Given they all speak the same language and that the tight-knit South African pros tend to play well in each other’s company, might they start as favourites at Centurion?

Phil

Though I have already written about Phil Mickelson’s ‘story’ being blown out of proportion of late, it’s been hard not to get caught up in it. Particularly since I’ve been knee-deep in Mickelson literature recently: with Tiger & Phil having taught me plenty about a man tricky for non-American reporters to get to know, I’ll hopefully finish Alan Shipnuck’s Phil on the flight to England. (Hit the button below to get my review next week.)

It might be an obvious choice, but I think it’s going to be difficult to be anywhere but Phil Mickelson’s tee box when the gun is fired tomorrow afternoon.

And I can’t wait to see where he fires his golf ball after such a long layoff. What price he goes with driver?

Speaking of being out on the course, I’m not going to have any other option because I’ve not been granted access to the media centre. But hey, maybe that’s a blessing in disguise. Like I said, I’ll be able to tell you what it’s like to be in the gallery at an LIV event. And I’ll be gathering opinions from all the other punters braving this new world – hit the subscribe button below to get ‘em straight to your inbox for free!

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