Can men's pro golf reconcile & what might it look like?

[wjemather]

'If We Want To Figure Out Why The Game Of Golf Is Not Back Together, Go Ask Those Guys' - Scottie Scheffler Insists LIV Golfers To Blame For Golf's Big Divide

Scottie Scheffler reiterated his stance that LIV golfers were to blame for the continued split in men's pro golf, while insisting the PGA Tour still had a better standard

www.golfmonthly.com

Scheffler not messing around

Context and tone are important, and that certainly isn't being conveyed in lots of reporting and comments.
But some of these insular PGA Tour players really should think a bit more deeply... only one tour is banning otherwise eligible members of their tour from competing. If they stopped doing that, they would undoubtedly get to play together at least a couple of times more often.
Blah, blah, blah. Yawn.

 

[Mel Smooth]

'If We Want To Figure Out Why The Game Of Golf Is Not Back Together, Go Ask Those Guys' - Scottie Scheffler Insists LIV Golfers To Blame For Golf's Big Divide

Scottie Scheffler reiterated his stance that LIV golfers were to blame for the continued split in men's pro golf, while insisting the PGA Tour still had a better standard

www.golfmonthly.com

Scheffler not messing around

Wasn't this what he said last year....

Funnily enough - it's almost word for word - so maybe somebody from the corrupt golf media has got the big brown spoon out yet again, and all the gullible people that believe everything they say, have fallen for it yet again

"If the fans are upset, then look at the guys that left," Scheffler said.

Article dated 12th March '24.

World number one Scheffler takes swipe at LIV Golf players as merger talks continue

Scottie Scheffler says golf fans should direct their frustration at the players who joined LIV Golf if they feel disillusioned with the rivalry between the tours.

www.abc.net.au

 

[Arthur Wedge]

Wasn't this what he said last year....

Funnily enough - it's almost word for word - so maybe somebody from the corrupt golf media has got the big brown spoon out yet again, and all the gullible people that believe everything they say, have fallen for it yet again

"If the fans are upset, then look at the guys that left," Scheffler said.

Article dated 12th March '24.

World number one Scheffler takes swipe at LIV Golf players as merger talks continue

Scottie Scheffler says golf fans should direct their frustration at the players who joined LIV Golf if they feel disillusioned with the rivalry between the tours.

www.abc.net.au

Didn’t realise that golf media can be corrupt

 

[Mel Smooth]

Golf journalist propagating hate - I say 'journalist', but Lynch is nothing like, just a gobshite with a platform....

It's funny, a few weeks ago Brandel was saying what a good guy Yasir was after he'd played golf with him, and the stars looked like they were aligning - then Yasir rejected the deal the PGAT were proposing and it looks like the directive from Ponte Vedra to the PGAT's bought and paid for media was to resume the LIV attacks. I really do hope people are taking note of what is going on.

Eamon Lynch | Golfweek
9 hours ago
As Air Force One flies, it’s about 500 miles from Seaside, Florida, to Trump National Doral, where LIV Golf is about to make the first North American stop of its fourth squanderous season. Seaside was the filming location for Peter Weir’s 1998 dystopian comedy The Truman Show, in which Jim Carrey played a young man enjoying an idyllic existence that, unbeknownst to him, was wholly contrived for a television show by unscrupulous profiteers.

Next week at Doral, Yasir Al-Rumayyan will play Truman. The head of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has torched more than $5 billion on the LIV fiasco but his fee-taking barnacles will be keen to mount an elaborate charade and convince him that progress is real, that a corner has been turned, that the cash spigot must remain on.

He’ll see a crowd, but not that it’s comprised of MAGA faithful, preening crypto bros, graduates of crisis actor casting calls and bored golf fans offered steeply discounted tickets. He’ll see sponsors paraded, but not that they’re signatories to derisory deals that no serious league would waste postage on an email press release to announce. He’ll see a new broadcasting partner in Fox Sports, but not that it’s more an advertising play than a rights deal, or that Fox currently pays $50 million a year to not broadcast golf, having exited its USGA agreement five years ago. He’ll see (male-only) influencers in a facsimile of the PGA Tour’s Creator Classic, but not that he’s already oversubscribed with unserious competitors. He’ll see the President of the United States glad-handing, pocketing a check and basking among his people, but not that Donald Trump has repeatedly ridiculed LIV in private conversations.


If recent history is a guide, Al-Rumayyan will embrace the pantomime. “We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented,” said Ed Harris as Christof, the omnipotent producer of Truman’s daily life. “It's as simple as that.”

LIV’s Miami tournament, on the eve of the Masters, was its third North American event last year. In ’25 it’s the first, after stops in Riyadh, Adelaide, Hong Kong and Singapore. Most of this season’s ratings would be exceeded by a YouTube stream of Jay Monahan modeling his wardrobe of plaid sport coats that call to mind Rodney Dangerfield. Singapore (34,000) and Riyadh (12,000) attracted numbers that would be woeful even if each eyeball was counted separately. But with a good time slot against a thin field at the Valero Texas Open, better promotion and a bigger network — The CW was the beneficiary of last year’s giveaway — LIV’s Miami event will show a sizable uptick in viewership.


And from that single thread, a blanket will be woven to pull over the boss’s eyes.

Those who live in Al-Rumayyan’s pocket book are laying the table to show him a win, and will be joined by the pitiable ranks of unpaid, online slurps for whom LIV bootlicking is their only shot at relevance. Al-Rumayyan might be about desperate enough to believe them. After all, if you’ve wasted billions from the purse of a mercurial dictator, you’re probably eager to embrace any narrative that suggests traction with fans and partners, any glimmer of hope on the horizon could have you shouting ‘Yalla habibi!’ Especially if you’ve apparently decided to speed past the undeserved off-ramp built for you by the PGA Tour.

No matter how convincingly the sycophants strut, Doral’s agitprop pageant won’t change LIV’s trajectory. There’s no sustainable audience interest, no meaningful commercial revenue stream, no prospect of recovering a dime of the billions spent. There’s nothing except takers, the executives, players, agents and hangers-on who want to keep their Truman in his make-believe bubble for as long as they can. So abject failure will be recast as nascent success, private mockery as public praise, imitation as originality, down as up. It’s the Hindenburg cloaked as a space rocket. Someone really ought to remind Al-Rumayyan of that old cliché about the truth being quiet, and how it's the lies that are always loud.

9 hours ago