The Pellucid Perspective - July 2022 - 8

INDUSTRY
CONTROVERSIES
Former PGA Commissioner,
Tim Finchem
rent schedules and restrictions of the legacy TOURs for the competition
against " the best " and 2) convincingly bankrolling that
effort for a sustained period of time. Those were insurmountable
obstacles to forming another TOUR...until they weren't.
My take is the PGA TOUR's initial response/defense was,
" we'll starve the upstart of talent by making any players joining
LIV ineligible to compete on the TOUR. "
It's a compelling
card to play for the professional golfers who weekly want
to compete against the best current players in the world and
thus test their mettle in the high-risk/high-reward competition
model. What happened along the way was there emerged two
groups of golfers which were intrigued by this new model: Aging
stars who still had game and name-recognition but were
being outgunned at the highest levels and solid, mid-level professional
golf journeymen who wanted a better work/life balance
playing the game they loved. Gaining some talent traction
among these two groups, LIV began to build some unexpected
credibility/viability dashing the PGA TOUR's preferred outcome
of nipping it in the bud without the benefit of exposing it
to the market and letting economic forces and audiences decide.
That shifted the argument into the realm of financial feasibility
and endurance and here I believe the TOUR realized that
it had a formidable competitor. It's an interesting day when you
open your email and see the PGA TOUR Commissioner admit
that there are entities in life and sport that they can't outspend.
After 20+ years in the industry and watching from the sidelines
the various maneuverings, staffing and compensation practices
of the TOUR, I have to candidly admit that I derived an
amount of schadenfreude (delight in others' misfortune) seeing
that comment from the press conference. With the possibility
of potentially being outflanked on both their primary defensive
positions (talent and money), the TOUR, many of its players
and the historical and current " figureheads " pivoted from those
two tangible elements of the argument to the intangibles: Loyalty
to the PGA TOUR and everything its done for players and
society at large and the scourge of " sportwashing " (i.e. buying
8 The Pellucid PersPecTive
some type of unearned legitimacy in human rights or democracy
through the hosting/financing of sports competitions; see
China hosting Olympic Games as an oft-cited example). Given
that these two are in fact " intangibles " and there is no empirical
right or wrong but one person's facts and opinions vs. another's
I won't attempt to foist my opinion on you and we'll leave your
opinion to yourself as well. We'll let the golf media, players and
others continue to flog this for the next year and try to pull the
court of public opinion to one side or the other.
One interesting fact to consider however is I wonder, when
the initial PGA of America members who launched the PGA
TOUR introduced their idea and brought it to fruition, did the
PGA of America cry " disloyalty " or go to the extents of this
battle to keep those players, the tournaments and money " in the
fold " ? If so, it's somewhat ironic that, decades later, a breakaway
nation of the PGA TOUR now finds itself trying to mount a
defense against another entity doing exactly what they did to
come into existence.
If there are any readers out there who
know the specifics of the PGA TOUR origin story and how
that went over with the PGA of America, I'd be interested in
understanding those details.
The most recent development that also doesn't seem to be
breaking to the TOUR's favor is the question of whether the
LIV participants can compete in the majors. This is a key element
in my opinion of the " denial to competition " card initially
played. It turns out that in the first test of this, the US Open,
the USGA isn't going to take sides in this debate and will allow
the LIV'ers who qualify the opportunity to compete. That's a
slight problem when you assert that " disloyalty " will " disqualify "
you from competing against the best in the championships that
matter when, oops, you don't control any of the 4 majors. If
the TOUR can't get the USGA, PGA of America, R&A and
Augusta National to stand in solidarity to exclude the LIV golfers,
this element of their business model defense is significantly
diluted. That brings me to the final obvious question of why we
don't just let this play out in the free market as an alternative
July 2022
PGA OF AMERICA
The Pellucid Perspective - July 2022

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