Recently in the world of golf, there has been a new controversy surrounding the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) and LIV tours. The LIV is a Roman numeral that represents 54, which is the lowest number of strokes one can shoot in an 18-hole game of golf. Today, I will be taking a closer look at the main controversy and some of the underlying issues.
The first thing I want to examine is what the LIV tournament and the PGA tournaments are. The PGA tour is by far the most famous tour in all of golf. Members of the PGA have become famous. Some of the people that are included in the PGA are Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Bubba Watson and many more famous golfers. This is different from the LIV tournament.
According to Sporting News writer Jacob Cameker, “the LIV tournament is a startup tournament that is competing against the PGA.” Some of the PGA members have left the PGA to join the LIV for various reasons. Chief among those reasons are that the competition has more ways to prosper than the PGA. The general premise of the LIV does not sound completely controversial, until one looks more into detail. Here is where things begin to get a little strange.
The LIV must have funding from somewhere. It cannot just pay the golfers with nothing. It turns out that the LIV tournament is not backed financially by the United States but rather by Saudi Arabia. This is not extremely strange, but I would think that all the big names in the United States would stay with the PGA, as it is financially backed by the United States. It only gets even more controversial from here as several golfers are upset with Saudi Arabia’s history of violence and oppression; therefore, LIV entering the world of golf has triggered some interesting chain reactions.
One of those chain reactions is having several golfers fight against those who have joined the LIV tour. One of the things that has been fought over is the contract in the PGA. The PGA contract has a clause that states that no golfer can golf in a tournament that is not sponsored by or through the PGA without permission. Since several members have decided to join the LIV tour, those members lose all their rights as members of the PGA. According to The Dartmouth independent reporter Lanie Everett the members who left the PGA are no longer allowed to play in PGA tournaments. This is only the beginning of the fight, though; there is still a lot more to this controversy.
Another interesting aspect to this controversy is what the members who are not part of the LIV are doing to try and fight back. The members who left the PGA are now trying to play in the FedEx Cup Playoffs. The members of the LIV tried to get a temporary restraining order on other events so they could play in the FedEx tournament. However, the PGA is restricting access to the FedEx tournament only to members of the PGA and not the LIV. According to CBS professional golf writer Patrick McDonald, “On Tuesday, Aug. 9, a Federal judge denied a temporary restraining order, allowing the PGA Tour to restrict access to the 2022 FedEx Cup Playoffs from three Saudi Arabian-backed LIV Golf players who filed a lawsuit in hopes of participating in the postseason competition.”
Thus, these players did not play in the FedEx cup. However, there is still persistent fighting going on over issues similar to this. There is one last thing I would like to look at: the strangeness of the contracts of the LIV tour members.
Their contracts are drafts and we do not know if these drafts are the same for every player. One thing we do know for sure is that the players are, according to sports journalist Mark Harris, “supposed to wear LIV Golf apparel even when playing in tournaments outside of LIV.” This does not sound strange to me, as the PGA also requires a strict dress code for the golfers. Another thing that is unusual, according to Harris, is that players are required to try to recruit players to join the LIV tournament. The players are required to recruit, and I’m sure this is similar to their contracts in the PGA. The difference is that there are talent scouts that do most of the recruiting for the PGA. That is not the case with the LIV. I would normally not have much of an issue with this, however, the number one area that they can recruit from is from the PGA. I hope this sheds some light on what has been going on in the world of golf lately.
