In the early 1990s, some newspaper columns dismissed cell phones as a fad that wouldn’t catch on. “Why would anyone need to be contactable all the time? They are just for people with large egos to show off,” was the gist of these insights.

The rise of mobile phones, and the associated telecommunications networks to run them, coincided with the internet moving from a tool in some major universities, to going mainstream. These two massive leaps in advances were not only technological game-changers, but societal ones too.

Very few people, let alone humble columnists, could have foreseen the impact these converging industries would have on humans.

Mobile phones have morphed into smartphones and they are virtually another limb for most people. Some might say they are even more important than a limb, such has our dependence on them grown.

This is a way of saying, be careful of dismissing something too quickly. Almost every industry has had a revolution, or at least rapid evolution, and golf might be no different. 

Portraits of International Team Captain Trevor Immelman (left) and Davis Love III greet golfers walking to the first tee during a practice round for the 2022 Presidents Cup golf tournament at the Quail Hollow Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, US, 19 September 2022. (Photo: EPA-EFE / ERIK S LESSER)

LIV grows

The upstart LIV Golf has shaken professional golf to its core. 

When it launched earlier this year, after months of speculation about its birth, rapid dismissals insisted the breakaway was a gimmick that wouldn’t catch on. Those early takes are giving way to “… oh, hell, they are here to stay. Now what?” responses.

This weekend sees the 14th staging of the biennial Presidents Cup in Charlotte, North Carolina, and never has it been played against such an unusual backdrop. Both teams – the United States and the Internationals – are below strength because of defections to LIV Golf.

No one predicted this scenario a year ago, or even six months ago, but on the eve of the matchplay team tournament, some of the game’s hottest players will miss it. 

Cam Smith, the mulleted Aussie who won the 2022 Open Championship at St Andrew’s in style, joined LIV soon after his sensational win confirming him as the hottest player on the planet this year.

He followed fellow Aussie Marc Leishman in the breakaway stable and, soon after, Chilean rising star Joaquin Niemann joined the multibillion-dollar LIV party.

Trevor Immelman of South Africa tees off on the 2nd hole during the second round of the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 17 January 2019. (Photo: EPA-EFE / NEVILLE HOPWOOD)

Throw in Louis Oosthuizen, a guaranteed 2022 Presidents Cup pick, and the defections caused a severe dent in the International selections available to captain Trevor Immelman.

The Americans also saw a slew of almost certain Presidents Cup participants defect to the lucrative LIV circuit that has reportedly paid signing on fees of $125-million and up.

Players such as Dustin Johnson, a former world number one, Patrick Reed, the 2018 Masters champion and Ryder and Presidents Cup regular, and Bryson DeChambeau, the 2020 US Open winner, are LIV members. 

Four-time major winner Brooks Koepka is also part of the Saudi-backed league and therefore an outcast from the Presidents Cup, which is owned by the PGA Tour – until this year, golf’s richest and most powerful organisation.

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Presidents Cup undermined 

Despite all the positive rhetoric coming from Charlotte, there is no doubt that the defections to LIV have impacted on the Presidents Cup’s prestige. 

It has always been played in the Ryder Cup’s shadow, starting as it did in 1994, half a century after the first Ryder Cup was played, and the LIV backdrop has further undermined its credibility.

Obviously, as a contest conceived by the PGA Tour in the early 1990s to recognise golf’s growing global stature, it’s in the best interests to portray an illusion of “business as usual” this week. 

Davis Love III of the US hits from the fairway on the 10th hole during the final practice round for the 2020 PGA Championship golf tournament at TPC Harding Park in San Francisco, California, US, 5 August 2020. (Photo: EPA-EFE / TANNEN MAURY)

US captain Davis Love III, when asked if supporting the PGA Tour was more important than having the 12 best players available to him, shot back: “We have both.”

“On current form a couple of months ago, Dustin would have been a (captain’s) pick from wherever he was in points, pretty far down,” Love said in his pre-tournament media conference.

“But he would have been a veteran pick. Obviously, he was the hero of the (Ryder Cup) team at Whistling Straits. He was a great partner for (Collin) Morikawa.

“So, yes, we miss him. But I think, on points, we’ve pretty much got the guys we wanted to get. We would have had to make a spot for him as a pick further down, unless he got on a huge roll in the FedEx Cup,” Love added. “There’s no talk in our team room about anybody missing.”

The Internationals have eight rookies in their team, and that’s mostly down to the impact of the defections to LIV.

“Every single player that ended up going, and not going, knew what the situation was. It was part of the decision-making process for all of them,” Immelman said.

“Am I disappointed they’re not able to be here? Yeah, absolutely. But we have the 12 guys here that we love and that want to be here. And now we get to go. So, we’re looking forward.”

Fading criticism

But the Presidents Cup, and more broadly, men’s professional golf, is far from business as usual. As more and more high-profile, successful and powerful (in terms of their marketability) players jump across to LIV, the weaker the PGA’s stance becomes.

Those who have signed on with the deep-pocketed Saudi-backed venture have been labelled as sell-outs. LIV has been criticised as a “sportswashing” attempt by a nation trying to improve its reputation in the face of criticism over its human rights record.

But those criticisms are falling away as it becomes clear that LIV might be here to stay. The PGA Tour has banned LIV players from its tournaments and the Official Golf World Rankings refuses to award points to LIV events. But LIV is apparently in it for the long haul, using the tactic of “attention economy”.

The attention economy is, broadly speaking, the notion that attention has commercial value. If attention is captured and retained, it can be sold. And LIV is certainly succeeding in the former. Now can it produce the latter?

At the moment, LIV’s tournaments are broadcast in a very limited way. It uses YouTube and its own website for the broadcast feed, which carries no commercials. At this stage, the published viewership numbers of its tournaments are modest.

But with the estimated $500-billion Saudi Public Investment fund underpinning LIV Golf (and other sports properties such as Newcastle United), funding its existence – despite a lack of commercial support – is not an issue. The seemingly bottomless well of money at LIV chief executive Greg Norman’s disposal, is staggering.

The moral outrage against LIV is also a brittle game to play, because both the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour (the former European Tour) have long accepted money from dubious sources.

Tournaments are played in China and Saudi Arabia, and big petroleum companies, greedy banks and apparel companies that run sweatshops in Asia are regularly and prominently on display in professional golf.

That Saudi Arabia is a bad, bad place with a widely and extensively documented history of human rights abuses is not in question. But so are some of the countries the golf establishment is already in bed with.

Where the moral line begins and where it ends is opaque.

And though the PGA and DP Tours are happy for media outrage about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record to run as justification for LIV’s abolition, the reality is that it’s not really a strong enough disincentive.

As more and more players defect, and more tournaments such as the Presidents Cup are impacted, it becomes increasingly clear that LIV, like the mobile phone, is here to stay. 

It’s just a case of whether LIV evolves into golf’s equivalent of a smartphone, or dies like the Nokia 6110. DM