Can you feel an undisputed world golf tour getting closer? It may look like men’s pro golf is facing an unplayable lie right now, but the current cage-rattling by Greg Norman and his Saudi chums could be exactly the catalyst we’ve been waiting for. So if you share my view that a genuine, undisputed world tour is decades overdue for this sport, read on.
If you’ve not seen the news, it can be summarized as follows: the Asian Tour has announced a tournament in England later this year, and it will be part of a tour-within-a-tour they’re calling an International Series. Norman is the front man and the money – which is enough to get the attention of all golf’s biggest names – is primarily Saudi Arabian. The Great White Shark is also promising an American event in the near future. Considering the renegade events on what are traditionally their mutually exclusive territories, both the DP World Tour (which for now is just a rebranded European Tour, despite the grand name) and the PGA Tour have something to think about. The established tours could find their best players going worldwide: wherever the upstart alliance’s appearance fees and schedule dictate.
(Dustin Johnson, by way of example, had a very good holiday in Saudi Arabia not so long ago. Just look at that smile!)
And if that comes to pass? Well, the two major tours have had literally decades to set aside their own myopia and allow a genuine world tour to flourish. Though they’ve woken up in recent months, they’ve gotten no further than signing a cautious ‘strategic alliance’. So far, this has resulted only in a couple of co-sanctioning deals over the Scottish Open/Barbasol and Open Championship/Barracuda weeks, the choice of which almost seems designed to avoid rocking any boats with fields that look much different to what we’d get anyway.
So this pussyfooting ‘rapprochement’ is a long way from producing anything even close to a Formula 1-style world championship series. A series where every event would feature all the world’s top players, allowing juicy rivalries and narratives to develop. A series that could stage tournaments on the finest courses in the world, regardless of location. A series at least some golf lovers must have considered a no-brainer ever since F1 established exactly that concept in…wait for it…nineteen-fifty.
The only real wonder is that it has taken as long this for someone to come along and take advantage of Europe and America dragging their heels. Good luck to them, I say. And I reckon their best chance is to crack on with it hard and fast.
What we can learn from cricket
We’ve seen this kind of thing in sport before. The first episode that springs to mind is Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket in the late 1970s. The outline is familiar: big money comes along to tempt best players away from establishment structures. Establishment gets worried.
That’s as far as we’ve gotten with the current golf drama – though the worry is assumed given the establishment isn’t making any statements. So, how did the Packer challenge unfold from that point? Well, cricket’s authorities made ‘rebel’ players into pariahs with bans, but plenty of players took the riches anyway. As talk of similar measures swirls around the golf world now, that last point is a big one. As an individual sport heavily dependent on star names who hardly have to worry about feeding their families, the world’s top golfers probably have more clout than those cricketers did back then.
In less than three years, however, the split was settled and the pariahs were being eased back into the fold. The establishment regained control – though Packer had gotten the TV rights he wanted and some of his innovations were here to stay. Players knew they had a voice and the governance of the game took on a new dynamic. In other words, compromise won the day because Packer would have continued to rattle the cage if the existing authorities didn’t give a little.
A Packer-esque prod
Whether the Asian Tour ‘initiative’ morphs into a genuine world tour in its own right, or merely spurs the existing Big Two into creating one, doesn’t matter all that much as far as I’m concerned. As long as the game gets a shove in the right direction. If there are a couple of messy and bitter years, such as we saw with World Series Cricket, it’ll still be worth it if we get a top-tier global tour out of it at the end.
Assuming that’s where this ultimately goes, do any of us really have a problem with the ‘European’ and PGA Tours becoming feeder series to an elite world tour? Sure, some commercial deal-makers will inevitably end up gnashing their teeth. But for golf fans? Having 16-20 top-quality final rounds firmly in the year calendar, as opposed to having to book out 10-12 hours every Sunday as the Euros and Yanks waddle slowly around whatever courses they’re playing that week? Which would you prefer? (Leave a comment, I want to know.)
Major bones of contention
Just as cricket’s establishment was able to threaten ‘Packer players’ with exclusion from international test matches, golf’s obvious bargaining chip would be the majors. That’s where it could get really interesting – because the majors are the four tournaments that mean more to the world’s elite players than cash does. Only excommunication from the majors might truly give ‘rebels’ pause for thought.
On the other side, however, a world tour without majors is arguably viable. They are, after all, ‘special’ events and there is a case for them not being part of any tour at all. All of them have their own paths and narratives. While they do give any tour legitimacy, I’m not sure Norman needs to lose sleep over whether the US Open joins his schedule. But if the players themselves are made to choose between the big four and the big money, a detrimental split would beckon.
How likely is that, though? While the PGA Championship is a part of the PGA Tour’s DNA, Augusta National and the US Golf Association can ultimately do what they want with the Masters and the US Open. Ditto the R&A with the Open Championship. All of them are primarily concerned with attracting the world’s top-ranked players, and they have indelible history on their side. Prestige enough that players would ultimately come along even if they weren’t playing for a penny. Or part of any tour.
There are long-standing relationships in place, of course, and any tacit acceptance of Norman’s crowd by a major would get exceptionally spicy. So spicy, in fact, that it would ultimately force a resolution. Imagine The Masters saying, ‘The PGA Tour can ban whomsoever it wants for playing Asian Tour, but we’re inviting whomsoever we want to our tournament.’ I suspect that there’s only one winner in that deadlock. Someone will have to give, and that someone won’t be wearing a green jacket.
Whether the tours could really put pressure on the majors (three of them, anyway) to turn away ‘rebel’ players is surely debatable. The one thing they could leverage more easily is the Ryder Cup, which they run themselves. Again, though, it would be playing with an enormous bonfire to force players to make a choice. The evolution of Ryder Cup selection policies suggests these will have to show compromise before the men hitting the balls into holes do.
No question, a scrap over these events would be messy. But sometimes a level of messiness has to be reached in order for compromise to happen. Just like in the Kerry Packer era.
Popular objections
Now I’ll address a few of the ways in which the Norman offensive has been labelled distasteful or morally reprehensible – at this point mostly by media.
First, there is the charge that it’s all about greed and money. Well, yes – and so are the existing tours! Golf is driven by prize money, appearance fees, commercial deals, rich philanthropists…there’s nothing new here except some of the amounts involved. I’d challenge anybody involved in any professional tour – promoter, sanctioning body, or player – to look me in the eye and say the Saudi cash is an affront to some noble integrity tied up with professional golf. That stuff is out the window the moment people move away from the amateur scene, I’m afraid. There are some good quotes doing the rounds as players snipe here and there, but having the discussion at all is as laughable as watching millionaires stealing toys off each other in a playground.
What about the geographically aggressive tournaments being scheduled? To be fair, I haven’t seen an official line from the DP World Tour to the effect that Keith Pelley actually feels threatened by the June event at Centurion Golf Club. (The PGA Tour also didn’t respond to my request for comment yesterday.) But it’s hard to imagine that he’s terribly keen on the idea of an Asian Tour event in England. Yet it was his tour that established the principle that geofencing is overrated – and did so decades ago. Ironically, the Gulf Swing and its big money were key to the credibility of its everywhere-but-the-Americas schedule. Those chickens are coming home to roost, and ‘Europe’ really can’t complain.
The question of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record has also been raised. DP World Tour aficionados surely know they can’t be holier than thou in this regard after their tour sanctioned the Saudi International from 2019-2021. Not to mention regularly staging events in China. Because of what’s at stake here, such objections come across as a convenient, politically correct way to discredit the newest show in town.
Unfortunately, the point is moot because the money isn’t going anywhere, whether you consider it dirty or not. The merits of sport and politics mixing is a whole other discussion, but in the case of golf, I think nothing would do more good than a superstar player or three declining invitations – and saying exactly why they’re doing so. Rory McIlroy seems to have taken that route, and good for him. But he shares the view that it’s a decision for individual players.
Cars and conclusion
With that out of the way, let me return to my central point: if Norman and company want to go for this, they should go at it hard. They should create an untenable situation as quickly as possible, just as Kerry Packer did. They must get the messy, ugly stuff out of the way fast, because any other approach will do lasting damage. Just as we saw in American Indycar racing, where two series pig-headedly raced in parallel for 12 years following a split in 1996, driving away a generation of fans and even doing long-term damage to the reputation of the Indy 500 itself.
While it’s fascinating to reflect on some of sport’s most dystopian outcomes, golf today is different from the Indycar situation because the guy running the ‘breakaway’ also owned the jewel-in-the-crown event. It was a bit like Augusta National saying they were starting a season-long tour of their own. That’s not what’s going on here.
Also, unlike Indycar at the time of its rift, it’s not a case of dividing one strong series into two weak ones. In contrast, it’s such a no-brainer to make a bigger, better global series than having two ‘smaller’ ones trying to co-exist with flowery alliances. And I think that’s what makes this shake-up so likely to force the positive outcome I’d like to see: a bona fide world golf tour.
The game is there for the taking – but let it happen quickly.
Post-script added on the eve of the London Invitational in June 2022: There’s another historical ‘breakaway’ I could have added to this story — one of the oldest of all, in fact. I refer to Rugby League, a sport that began in 1895 as a pay-for-play rebellion against the staunchly amateur Rugby Union. Though we cannot say that Rugby League became the dominant form of the sport across the globe, the code nonetheless remains with us almost 130 years later. And in a few places like New South Wales and much of northern England, it is indeed the number one brand of rugby. Another example of a cash-driven upstart that didn’t go away…
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Interesting view and good debunking of some of the objections. That being said - its hard to see past the fact that the PGA is for all intents and purposes the tour that most pro's want to play on. Couple that with 3 of the majors taking place in the US; the big ticket WGC events all US based with many of the best of the best living in the US and there will be an uphill battle. I also struggle to see the value of this world tour if they don't get a decent chunk of the world's best players lined up (say 8 of the top 10 or 16 of the top 20). Money talks - but this will probably all play out with the PGA giving more of the media rights money to already well-paid professionals (the average prize purse growth over the last 30 years is nothing short of amazing).