Will wonders never cease? Today I’m going to write about a rare issue where I agree with The Former Guy.
The first golf tournament I remember was the 1962 U.S. Open. My parents came from southwestern Pennsylvania, and the tournament was held in suburban Pittsburgh. They — and most of the crowd — rooted for the superstar golfer from Latrobe, Pennsylvania (formerly the home of Rolling Rock beer), Arnold Palmer. But I had been born in Ohio, and at all of seven years old, I was rooting for the Ohioan and Ohio State University graduate Jack Nicklaus, who was the reigning U.S. Amateur champion, had just turned pro, and had finished second and fourth in the U.S. Open (as an amateur — thus, no prize money) the prior two years.
I never knew until many years later that Palmer had been stationed in Cleveland, Ohio (my hometown) when he was in the Coast Guard in the early 1950s and that he was listed as playing out of a suburban Cleveland course when he won the U.S. Amateur in 1954, because all of his publicity said “Pennsylvania”.
Two years earlier (before I was old enough to pay attention), Palmer had edged out the amateur Nicklaus at the U.S. Open in suburban Denver (helped by Ben Hogan triple-bogeying the 72nd hole), but this time the two tied in regulation, mandating an 18-hole playoff the next day. Nicklaus went out on Monday and took the crowd out of it early, going four stokes up after six holes, and when Palmer managed to cut the gap to one, Nicklaus immediately picked up a stroke on the very next hole — and won by three. It was Nicklaus’ first major championship, but he went on to win a record 18. Palmer had already won five majors (Masters 3, U.S. Open 1, British Open 1, PGA 0), but he only won two more after that, the 1962 British Open (a month later) and the 1964 Masters.
Give Us Dirty Laundry?
One of the fascinating things about golf, and other individual sports such as tennis, is that the top players are the only reliable draws in the sport, other than the four Grand Slam tournaments. By contrast, in team sports, pundits and reporters often gripe that fans are rooting more for the laundry than the individual players. And, to be honest, they aren’t wrong.
The hilariously inept sportswriter/troll Jason Mastrodonato at the Boston Herald whines daily about the baseball owners “insulting” their stars by offering them “lowball” contracts: somewhere between $20-25 million per year on long-term fully-guaranteed contracts — which generally contain anticipated “dead years” at the end, under which the player will continue to be paid while no longer playing. From his perspective (perhaps as a wannabe-agent), Mastrodonato believes the stars deserve offers of more like $30-40 million annually, and he was horrified that the Red Sox, after the 2019 season, traded Mookie Betts to a team (the L.A. Dodgers) that was more willing to give him a fully guaranteed 12-year, $365 million contract (with a $65 million signing bonus included). But, truthfully, no one actually believes that Betts will play until 2032, when Betts turns 40 and the contract runs out, especially considering that Betts, now 29, already has missed time with injuries the past two years. Superstar players in team sports are often in a position to demand that teams pay them big bucks now and eat the future costs associated with those upcoming “dead years”, as Betts did.
But, in 2021, the laundry prevailed over the noise, and Boston fans obsessively followed the Red Sox’s run in the 2021 playoffs despite the “ghost of Mookie”. Even though they fell just short of the World Series against the Astros after knocking off the Yankees and Rays, there was no remaining trace of animosity (outside of the press corps) just under two years later. Sure, there were a few of the same players still around from Betts’ day — but just a few: Rafael Devers, Xander Bogaerts, J.D. Martinez, Christian Vazquez, Eduardo Rodriguez, Nate Eovaldi, and Ryan Brasier. Seven out of 25. A few others were still in Boston but idled: Chris Sale was injured; Matt Barnes was inactive. But all of the 25 who were playing shared the two most important traits: first, the name “Red Sox” on the front of their uniforms, and second, playing at Fenway Park in Boston.
Despite that, Mastrodonato still crusades virtually every day against the Red Sox, helped by the Sox’ 7-19 record this month (so far). Then again, we need to remember that John Henry, the principal owner of the Red Sox, is also the owner of the Herald’s main competitor, the Boston Globe, so perhaps the Herald thinks trolling is an effective competitive strategy (shades of The Former Guy).
Go for the Green . . . and the Grand Slam
But players in individual sports, like tennis and golf, have individual fans, not fans of their laundry. The first person to capitalize on the theory that the stars, not the events, were the most valuable part of the golfing world was a young lawyer from Cleveland named Mark McCormack. McCormack had been a good enough golfer to qualify for the U.S. Open as an amateur, and so he became acquainted with Arnold Palmer and sometimes played with him when Palmer was living in Cleveland. In 1960, two things changed McCormack’s life: he started a sports management firm called International Management Group (“IMG”), and he signed Palmer as his first client.
And right after Palmer won the 1960 U.S. Open came the first move. Palmer had already won the 1960 Masters. Because Great Britain was so poor after the devastation of WWII, the British Open had become impoverished. The entire prize fund of the 1959 British Open was just $14,000 (£5,000), with the standard 20% ($2,800, or £1,000) going to the winner. For this modest reward, players had to arrive on the Sunday before the tournament, because there was a 36-hole qualifying event on Monday and Tuesday (top qualifier collected a whole £50!), and only the top 100 players from the qualifying event (no ties!) actually made it into the 72-hole tournament, held on Thursday-Sunday.
Only two American professionals and two American amateurs had played in the 1959 tournament, and the tournament had been won by an unknown 23-year-old South African named Gary Player. In fact, only two Americans had won the tournament since WWII: Sam Snead at St. Andrews in his second appearance in 1946 (his first appearance had been at Carnoustie in 1937, and he didn’t endear himself to the British fans when he described St. Andrews in 1946 as “an old abandoned kinda place”), and Ben Hogan at Carnoustie in his first (and only) appearance in 1953. Neither Snead nor Hogan had ever been back, because the PGA Championship, held the week after the Open, now had over three times the prize money ($51,175 in 1959, with $8,250 going to the winner). But Hogan had gone to The Open (and skipped the PGA, which, because it was match play until 1957, was held the same week) because he wanted to create his own profession version (1953 Masters, 1953 U.S. Open, 1953 British Open) of Bobby Jones’ famous amateur Grand Slam from 1930 (U.S. Open, British Open, U.S. Amateur, British Amateur). Palmer only needed the British Open to match Hogan.
More to the point, Palmer and McCormack also wanted to match Jones’ four-event Grand Slam by adding a fourth event to Hogan’s three, and the PGA Championship, with a history going back to 1916, was the obvious choice, despite the back-to-back weeks — and only two people had ever won all four events (which became known as the “Career Grand Slam”): Hogan and Gene Sarazen. Plus, the U.S. golf professionals were all members of the PGA (Professional Golfers’ Association of America), along with thousands of club pros. So Palmer and McCormack decided to treat the professional Grand Slam as consisting of those four events.
For all of these reasons, Palmer went to St. Andrews — and the Open added a 40% hike to its prize purse as a result (from £5,000 to £7,000, which was about $19,600)— and then only 74 people (instead of the standard 100) qualified to tee off, led by top qualifier and defending champion Player, because 28 players had tied for 75th, and the Open qualifier didn’t have a playoff in those days; if you were tied for 101st, you were out! Including Palmer, only four Americans qualified — but Palmer ended up finishing second in a two-man battle, one shot behind Australian Kel Nagel, and just missed equaling Hogan.
Exhibitions versus Tour
The best thing that could have happened to Palmer and McCormack happened in 1962. Palmer won the Masters again, his third, this time in an 18-hole playoff against defending champion Gary Player (2nd) and Dow Finsterwald (3rd)). As discussed above, Nicklaus won the U.S. Open in an 18-hold playoff over Palmer. Palmer won the British Open, his second straight (Kel Nagel finished second, 6 shots behind; Snead (6th, in his first appearance since 1946), Nicklaus (34th in his first appearance ever, despite a first-round 80), and Nicklaus’ former amateur rival Phil Rodgers (3rd in his first appearance ever) also went over and qualified). [To keep top Americans coming over, the British Open added limited pre-qualifying in 1963 and ditched the mandatory 36-hole qualifier for those players, including former champions.] And then Player won the PGA, with Nicklaus 3rd and Palmer 17th, giving both Player (1959 British Open, 1961 Masters, and 1962 PGA) and Palmer victories in three of the four Career Grand Slam tournaments, with new professional Nicklaus clearly the heir apparent. What could be more logical that an exhibition event matching the three winners of the Grand Slam tournaments, especially when those winners were Palmer, Nicklaus, and Player?
Well, that’s what Mark McCormack thought, anyway. And so a 36-hole exhibition called the “World Series of Golf” was held at Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio. The important thing about this exhibition was the money — Palmer had won $20,000 for winning the Masters and $3,920 for winning the British Open; Nicklaus had won $17,500 for winning the U.S. Open, and Player had won $13,000 for winning the PGA, but this 36-hole exhibition paid a first prize of $50,000, second prize of $15,000, and third prize of $5,000. Nicklaus won, and in this two-round tournament earned almost as much as he earned in official prize money for the rest of the year (Palmer and Player tied for second and earned $10,000 each). And McCormack signed both Nicklaus and Player and marketed them with Palmer as the “Big Three”, pushing their unofficial earnings far beyond their official earnings for the rest of their careers.
And yet a huge part of the success of the “Big Three” was that Nicklaus and Player were the best golfers of their era: they became the third (Player, 1965) and fourth (Nicklaus, 1966) players to complete the Career Grand Slam (and the only one to accomplish it since Nicklaus is Tiger Woods); as of 2022, the list of all-time winners of men’s Grand Slam events is topped by Nicklaus (18), followed by Woods (15), Walter Hagan (11, ending in 1929 — but The Masters didn’t begin until 1934, which is why Hagan never won it), and then Player and Hogan (9 each). Palmer may have been a hugely popular star, the focus of “Arnie’s Army”, but Nicklaus and Player were simply better from that point forward.
But the money and attention being brought in by the increased TV revenues as star players developed went to the PGA, and most of the PGA membership were club pros, who wanted less to go to the touring pros and more to go to build the game at the club level. Everything came to a head after the 1968 PGA Championship, held at a new, nondescript, and now-defunct course in San Antonio, Texas in extreme heat, which the players viewed as an indication of how little the PGA cared about them. As a result, the tournament players left the PGA after that tournament and founded their own group, called the American Professional Golfers, Inc. After a couple months of skirmishes, the players agreed to return to the PGA in their own division, to be known as the Tournament Players Division, with its own executive director (former U.S. Golf Association head Joe Dey) and its own board consisting of four tournament players, three PGA executives, and three outside and independent directors.
And over the next decade-plus, the TPD continued to grow apart from the PGA, especially after career amateur turned tour player (at age 29!) Deane Beman succeeded Dey after five years and served for the next 20. Under Beman, the TPD became the mostly-independent PGA Tour, which set the standards regarding who could work, how they could remain qualified to work, what tournaments would be held, and how much money would be offered in prizes. In short, the PGA Tour became a cartel: an association of manufacturers or suppliers with the purpose of maintaining prices at a high level and restricting competition. When we think of cartels, we think of OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), and we generally curse them. But the PGA Tour is a much more controlling cartel than OPEC.
Who benefits?
At first, the cartel benefitted everyone. Going back to 1962 again, a 28-year-old blue-collar type with exactly one PGA victory came into the press tent as the leader after the third round of a minor Southern California PGA tournament, grabbed a far-too-warm beer in there, took a swig, spit it out, and promised the writers that, if he held on to win the tournament, they would be drinking chilled champagne afterward. Well, it turned out to be chilled cold duck, not champagne (too pricey), but the writers loved it and gave him the nickname “Champagne Tony” Lema. As it happened, the new nickname helped inspire Lema to become a star, not a journeyman, and he won 12 PGA tournaments, including the 1964 British Open, in less than four years — before he was killed in a plane crash in 1966.
Thanks to Beman and the PGA Tour cartel, struggles like that became distant memories. But one thing that didn’t change from 1962 was that stars could make more money playing exhibitions than playing on the Tour (Lema, in fact, was in a private plane flying to an exhibition when it crashed). Because of this, Beman built the PGA Tour schedule mostly to support the journeymen players, allowing opportunities for a rare journeyman to become a star, as Lema did, and he made sure to leave the stars plenty of time to play exhibitions or play in foreign countries (where tournaments could pay appearance fees to top golfers, which were banned on the PGA Tour). And in 1968, Mark McCormack created a system of world golf rankings to take foreign performance (but not exhibitions) into account, and that system became official in 1986, which meant that players could qualify for the major championships based on their rankings and not just on their performance on the PGA Tour.
Everything seemed to be in place for the cartel to continue indefinitely. Yet, as the old saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the PGA Tour had absolute power. After Beman retired, the pitches to increase payouts to the vast majority of the players in return for forcing the stars to play more PGA Tour tournaments became the major point of contention among the PGA Tour executives. They chose to chase the money and rearranged the schedule to maximize the revenue — which led to the huge payouts associated with the FedEx Cup and pleased the masses on the PGA Tour but seriously alienated many of the stars.
LIVing in the USA
And that led us to where we are now, with an upstart rival, the LIV Tour (so named because each tournament is only 54 holes, which in Roman numerals is LIV), luring many of the biggest name players, ranging from current stars (and major championship winners) such as Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Louis Oosthuizen, Patrick Reed, and Bryson DeChambeau (combined 9 major wins) to legends such as Phil Mickelson, Martin Kaymer, Sergio Garcia, and Henrik Stenson (combined 10 major wins), away from the PGA Tour by paying them closer to their actual worth in terms of TV and promotional rights. To maximize its TV appeal, the LIV tour limits its fields to 48 players and uses shotgun starts, so that, instead of waiting for the top players to tee off late in the afternoon, the top players are on the course for the entire event each day.
The cartel is striking back with a coordinated series of assaults on the main sponsor Saudi Arabia (which funds the LIV Tour through its sovereign wealth fund), plus a huge marketing campaign fueled by its TV flunkies partners (who have generally shut out the LIV Tour in year one), in an effort to deny the LIV Tour any publicity and any famous courses and to kill it before it can become established.
And the last part of that war by the PGA Tour is what brought The Former Guy into this debate, albeit peripherally. One thing that Donald Trump had been good at before becoming president was acquiring excellent golf courses for Trump Golf (generally out of bankruptcy). Among the famous courses now under the Trump umbrella are: (1) Turnberry (now “Trump Turnberry”), the great Scottish course where Nicklaus and Tom Watson battled in the 1977 British Open “Duel in the Sun”, (2) Doral (now “Trump National Doral”), located in a Miami suburb that hosted a PGA Tour event from 1962 to 2018 on its “Blue Monster” course, and (3) Bedminster (“Trump National”), which hosted the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open and had been scheduled to host the 2022 PGA Championship. But the R&A pushed Turnberry out of the British Open rotation, and the PGA pulled its 2022 championship from Bedminster, both over the controversy surrounding The Former Guy’s U.S. coup attempt on January 6, 2021 (and this no longer needs a qualifier like “alleged”; the testimony before the January 6 committee leaves no doubt that Trump was part of it).
[My favorite piece of the entire January 6 “controversy” was the immediate leaks after Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony (about Trump trying to physically force the Secret Service to take him to the Capitol so he could lead the coup) that the Secret Service agents would testify under oath that her testimony was false — followed (after all of the Trump fanboys had duly parroted this story in the far-right media) by the news that the Secret Service (run by a Trump crony during his term) had illegally deleted all of the text massages sent by agents on January 6, 2021, as well as those from the rest of Trump’s term, and it couldn’t recover them . . . accompanied by a blanket statement that the agency was cooperating but had no plans for agents to testify under oath (if they were even called to testify). If followers of The Former Guy had half a brain, they’d recognize that they had been played for suckers — but then again, if they had had a brain, they probably wouldn’t be followers of The Former Guy.]
Anyway, between the FedEx Cup pushing certain events out of the PGA Tour rotation — including the Doral tournament — and the snubs to Bedminster and Turnberry, it created a great opportunity for Trump Golf to provide some very prestigious venues to the LIV Tour: Doral and Bedminster in 2022 (in a year where there are only 8 LIV Golf events), and probably more in the future, perhaps including Turnberry, Trump National Jupiter (a Nicklaus-designed course built for the Ritz-Carlton chain), and Trump National D.C. (a Tom Fazio-designed course like Bedminster, formerly known as the Lowes Island Club). But Trump Golf is just a course provider, and its courses don’t owe one iota of their prestige to their affiliation with Donald Trump (the Trump name was added solely so Trump could charge the courses royalties for the name use). Nothing about those golf courses has anything to do with Trump (except perhaps for the way some of them have tried to stiff their service providers) or Trump’s politics. And they are great courses. Saudi Arabia is just a sponsor, but aside from putting up the money, it also doesn’t control anything about the golf. Why has the PGA Tour cartel been able to generate such a unanimous outpouring of support in its effort to retain its monopolistic control of pro golf?
No-Tell Cartel
In part, we could attribute it to sportswriters not being very bright. An old boss of mine frequently referred to sports as the “playpen of journalism”. Even though Phil Mickelson described the issues here succinctly (dealing with the Saudis is scary, but the PGA Tour cartel refuses to listen to its internal critics and instead tries to steamroller them), the reporters happily seized on the cartel’s explanation — Mickelson was a washed-up evil apostate, biting the hand that had fed him — and almost to a man (and woman) demonized Mickelson.
But the amount that the media internalized this narrative was even scarier than dealing with the Saudis. In the 2022 British Open, cartel mouthpiece Rory McIlroy had nearly 100% support from the media, while LIV players Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau were generally ignored . . . even though McIlroy only finished third, while Johnson tied for sixth and DeChambeau tied for eighth (two other LIV players, Abraham Ancer of Mexico and Sadom Kaewkanjana of Thailand, tied for 11th).
And as far as the issue with the Saudis . . . the #1 global enemy to the U.S. is China, not Saudi Arabia. The National Basketball Association owners have about $10 billion invested with China, and the league’s contracts there represent about $4 billion in value. And as a result, if China says “Jump!”, the NBA says “How high?” When an NBA executive tweeted about China’s terrible record on human rights in Hong Kong in 2019, he got censored (and stepped down at the end of the season), and the rest of the NBA world was noted only by its silence. So the cartel’s claim that cooperating with the Saudis is somehow un-American because of human right concerns can politely be described as “laughable”. But, as we said before, sportswriters aren’t very bright.
Yet . . . in a sport where “ability” is generally measured by performance in the Grand Slam tournaments, leaving the weekly grind of the PGA Tour doesn’t affect the defecting players very much (at least for now). Why? Because, although it organizes most professional tournaments, the PGA Tour doesn’t control any of the four Grand Slams. The PGA of America still runs the PGA Championship (and the Ryder Cup). The U.S. Golf Association runs the U.S. Open. The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews (through a former subsidiary just called “the R&A”) runs the British Open. And The Masters is controlled by the Augusta National Golf Club, a for-profit private corporation founded by the legendary golfer/lawyer (and 1930 amateur Grand Slam winner) Bobby Jones. The biggest tournament run by the PGA Tour is the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass (the Pete Dye course with the “island” 17th green).
Where Do We Go from Here?
But don’t expect the PGA Tour cartel to back down from its greed, similar to Major League Baseball, which worked to kill all the upstart baseball leagues after 1901 (including the Negro Leagues after Branch Rickey broke the MLB color barrier in 1945 by signing former UCLA football star Jackie Robinson), and the National Football League, which killed off all of its upstart competitors except for two that it merged with — the All-America Football League in 1949 (it absorbed three of the six AAFC teams: Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers, and Baltimore Colts) and the American Football League in 1966 (it absorbed all eight existing AFL teams as well as two new franchises that the AFL had agreed to add (Miami Dolphins and Cincinnati Bengals)). The only thing these leagues care more about than exploiting their monopoly status is maintaining it.
The biggest weapon that the cartel has is to withhold its players from the majors in an effort to pressure those tournaments to ban the players associated with LIV Golf, and cartel officer Davis Love III (a former journeyman player) has already threatened to do just that. Naturally, an order from the PGA Tour to its players to boycott a major would be an obvious antitrust violation, but Love proposes that the players boycott the tournaments on their own (!!), perhaps in return for future considerations from the cartel.
Meantime, although the LIV Tour has requested for its results to be included in the calculations of the Official World Golf Rankings, there has been no indication that it will be included — which will probably lead to another antitrust lawsuit, since neither the PGA Tour nor the R&A want LIV Golf included, and so it seems unlikely that it will be done (they can try to fall back on the argument that no standard for new additions exists). Who can tell how that lawsuit will come out? But if Saudi Arabia is willing to continue to fund the LIV Tour throughout these battles, it will probably win in the long run. What we have no way of knowing is Saudi Arabia’s tolerance for the litigious culture in U.S. sports.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the PGA Tour cartel wants to defend its monopoly status and is willing to propagandize and play dirty to do so. And frankly, in 2022 it shouldn’t come as any surprise that the press has lined up to support a cartel against the free market. After all, it’s what China would do.