Why is Men's Pro Golf Boring us?

Well, it's boring me and apparently a host of others, so is it boring for these reasons.....

To be honest I don’t know if it is, but the viewing figures, especially in the USA (with the notable exception of the PGA Championship) are through the floor. That tends to make me wonder what the hell is going on; you’d have thought with the earth-shattering arrival of a disruptor tour pulling so many top players away interest would be at an all-time high.

Of course, the fact no reputable broadcaster will touch LIV with someone else’s bargepole has to be an issue. Golf used to be a free-to-air staple in the UK, but you now have to pay to watch. The DP World Tour remains no more immune to the fall in TV viewership than the PGA Tour does in America. LIV’s on You Tube and a tiny streaming service no one watches.

So, what’s going on? I think you have to start with the fact more people are actually playing the game in this post-Covid world. Instead of staying in on a Sunday afternoon they’re out in the air hitting balls. Participation in the game, both in terms of formal “at clubs” golf, play at ranges and in simulators (not to mention floodlit in various parts of the world) is up significantly. Clubs are reporting waiting lists for membership, something not seen at these levels for, what, 30 years or more?

But I think it’s more than this. I think the ordinary punter is more fed up with the tournament professional than they’ve been for a while, and I think for a lot of complimentary reasons.

That golf at the top level needed a shake-up is beyond question. Firstly venues; apart from perhaps 10 or 12 weeks a year for the Majors, the Players, perhaps Riviera, Hilton Head, Crans, Leopard Creek (for the wildlife), the amazing DLF club Indian Open course and Scotland the players on all major tours could be playing anywhere. The courses all look the same, particularly all the PGA-owned country club venues in the US.

One positive thing you can say for LIV is they have taken top class international golf back to Australia, a territory genuinely starved of it for too many years – odd when you consider what a feather in the cap the winning of the Australian Open out on the sandbelt once was. But watching the same kinds of shots being played on the same kinds of venues week in, week out… who cares about that?

And the shot-making. I find it interesting how many people I talk to now watch women’s professional golf far more than the men’s. Why? Because they play a game we can recognize, just a lot better than we do. Men professionals play a game that has no meaning to the ordinary golfer. No pro hits a long-iron approach anymore; if it’s a 5 or 6-iron into a 230-yard par 3 it’s a shock. The constant hitting of short irons and wedges into what we ordinary blokes see as massive par 4s – it’s strength more than skill. For a while you go “ooooh” seeing the distances and the flights, then you start to think just how samey it all is. It seems no surprise that shot of the year last year was Rory smashing a controlled long-iron into a fierce wind onto the final par-4 green to win the Scottish Open – because it felt that was about the only time we saw that kind of shot being played all year long. Or maybe FOR YEARS.

An endless diet of 72-hole stroke play doesn’t help either. Mixed tournaments, the odd team/pairs event does relieve the tedium, but it needs something more than that. And it needs to STOP for a while. We used to have a couple of months of no serious top end golf. Now we have the wraparound season. Whoopee! More events no one cares about. Give it a rest for goodness sake. You REALLY CAN have too much of a “good” thing.

That the disruptor tour has had an impact I don’t think you can doubt. I’m not sure the Saudi Arabian funding is necessarily a huge part of it. There’s no doubt for some the regime is an issue; the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in their Turkish Embassy 6 years ago rings through the years, as should the fact that most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi. But it’s important to remember they are viewed by governments in the west as the Sunni/Wahabist balance to Shia Iran in Middle East geopolitics, and despite the House of Saud’s various adventures around the Gulf they’re very much the flavour du jour with the US. Perhaps not least because they buy so much military hardware.

Equally, many other sports have happily taken the Saudi petro-dollar. I am always reminded of seeing the Saudi oil domination described as having resulted from an over-enthusiastic hammering in of a tent peg, but there’s no doubt the country’s riches so accumulated have been routed into so many top sports and sportsmen and women that it’s difficult to be harsh over golfers doing the same.

But money is a part of the issue. The sums being banded around in the game have started to turn the punter off. When it was a genuine meritocracy, based on golfers apparently having to win, or at the very least play very well to make significant amounts of money I’m not sure anyone much bothered about someone scooping $10, 000, 000 for winning the Fedex – it was kind of viewed as earnt. With players being offered multiples of that just to join a tour and play considerably less I think fans started to question what was going on. Particularly with the obviously mendacious claims they were “growing the game” by taking the money.

More than this it’s the way the modern professional seems to feel they’re “owed” a living. Patrick Cantlay and the Ryder Cup cap is tip of the iceberg stuff. However, all this stuff around the money the pro seems to feel is their right could not be more out of kilter with a world still generally struggling with high inflation, rising costs of living and real issues around making ends meet. Seeing privileged, mostly ex-college kids earning millions and bitching about it is really not a good look, especially when it’s perceived non-entities getting the dough. I think this is hurting the standing of the game.

What hurts it even more is the players having so much say in what goes on within particularly the PGA Tour. There’s a reason these guys have agents and management companies doing most of the heavy lifting for them. Mostly they’re not up to the business side themselves; they don’t have the experience. It is close to exclusively top ranked guys within the player elements running the Tour, so again the level of self-interest is sky high. That disconnect between golf and reality thus bites even deeper.

The very fact that most of these guys do have extensive teams working with them is also a cause for concern, I believe. The agents and management companies are, if anything, even more self-interested than the players, and understandably so. They’re trying to make a living. If, as I suspect is the case, they are advising their clients on Tour policy decisions it further complicates the situation and makes the possibility of decisions purely for the good of the Tour’s paying public and sponsors even less likely.

All of this is difficult to understand from several perspectives when one considers how little LIV is cutting through in the market as a whole. Virtually no one watches it either in person or via its very limited television options, the major exception to that being, as mentioned above, Australia. Greg Norman may be doing his level best to make himself a laughing stock across the globe generally with just some ridiculous pronouncements, but he remains an Australian icon. It also doesn’t hurt that some of the best Aussie players have taken the LIV dollar. It’s a triumphal return whenever they go home.

The big question is for how long the PIF (Saudi Public Investment Fund) will continue to fund the loss-making enterprise that is LIV. The pit isn’t bottomless, and whilst there appear to be moves to see investment into the PGA Tour through their newly created commercial arm there are also mooted changes in the hierarchy of the PIF; that might create a different view on what’s the priority. Stick with LIV or look at far more commercially successful forms of golf sponsorship as well as diverting that money to other sports which also offer better returns on the investment. After all PIF aren’t there for golf – they’re there for the greater glory, improved diplomatic connections, better western press and commercial domination for Saudi Arabia.

The only exception to the downturn in golf’s popularity as a TV spectator sport has so far this year been the PGA Championship. It was pretty much a standard Tour set-up course, with nothing very majory about it, so why did it excite so much more interest among the watching public? I think there are several reasons for that.

The obvious one is the cast of characters involved in the final stages of the event. Valhalla might not have been set up obviously as a Major-style venue but it did bring some very, very good players to the top of the leaderboard on Sunday. A well-regarded Tour star/regular who’d been walloped the previous week, a LIV defector already popular because of his weirdness and reinventing himself as a man of the people, a slightly whacky Scandi Ryder Cup star and a bunch of Major winners. It was the perfect combination.

There was the “can the poor world number 1 recover from the Police incident” utter BS. I was disgusted by that whole treatment by the Media. A volunteer died, Scheffler clearly behaved like a complete ass and all we got through the majority of TV and written press was lickspittle apologia. I know Scottie comes over as this good, Christian boy – you watch him bully rules officials or bounce the wedge up and down repeatedly behind the ball when he’s in the rough. This is a very ruthless man with excellent PR. Personally, I think if he gets away with what is alleged it will be a travesty. And no doubt he will.

There was the return of Michael Block after last year’s heroics, including his hole in one. There were club pros making the cut. There were LIVers talking about the need to change the LIV playing format and, of course, there’s always Talor Gooch being stupid whilst posting another tied-45th in a Major.

The lesson of the PGA Championship is that the PGA Tour and LIV need to find some kind of common ground that allows the best in the world to compete more frequently. Those who play LIV and only LIV events may quickly become irrelevant in top tournament terms simply because they no longer routinely face the stress – if you played shotgun start team events once a month and bugger-all else you’d soon find your medal scores becoming crap, and so it is even for the likes of Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka et al.

It’s not so far off as it might look either. Some DP World Tour members (Rahm for one) have retained their membership of the Tour and are doing the necessary things to retain their entitlement to Ryder Cup selection – to play LIV events they have to apply for releases. These are routinely refused, the player serves a “suspension” but their DP World Tour membership remains live.

There will be a rapprochement, there will have to be. It’s likely to be once Jay Monahan is gone from PGA Tour, and I can’t work out how long that will be. His handling of the situation has been apocryphally bad and it is remarkable to me he hasn’t had to resign. What shape that agreement’s going to take lord only knows – nobody is going to be giving back the money they got to join LIV any time soon, that’s for sure.

In the meantime the Official Golf World Rankings are now anything but. LIV tournaments were never going to satisfy the criteria for OGWR points, the whole application process was a farce. Yes, it’s probably true the vested interests didn’t want them, but the events never qualified anyway. I now look to Data Golf (www.datagolf.com) who produce a weighted ranking including everyone. They have 4 LIVers in the top 20 – Rahm, Niemann, DeChambeau and Hatton – and that feels about right with 14 others in the top 100. Just reinforces the fact 8 out of 10 of the world’s best STILL play the PGA/DP/Asian Tours, placing their lack of a TV audience into even starker relief.

For me men’s professional golf on TV has for the most part taken on the status of muzak; something on in the background whilst I do something more important. I will watch Pinehurst and Troon avidly, but to be honest I’m far more likely to spend genuine concentration on watching Nelly, Minjee, Lydia and the countless Koreans, because they play MY game, just a whole damn sight better than me.

What do you think?