How professional golf arrived at its breaking point
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If the PGA Tour had allowed members to go play in LIV events there would be many other rival tours springing up, further diluting the PGA Tour product. The TV contracts and event sponsorship deals all have strength of field clauses the tour has to maintain to keep the money flowing, so there was never going to be a world where the tour said yes to players asking for permission to play LIV events.
If those legal challenges go through, then yes, we absolutely could end up in a world where PGA has to say yes to allowing competition in other tours.
Doesn't sound like it's their mission would be harmed by competing tournaments. After all, the majors aren't operated by the PGA and they co-exist just fine.
The PGA Tour mission statement is very different: "By showcasing golf's greatest players, we engage, inspire and positively impact our fans, partners and communities worldwide."
Hard to showcase the greatest golfers if they are off playing in different events.
The tour normally grants requests to play in other events, like world players wanting to compete in their national open or host a charity tournament. Lots of European players maintain status on both PGA Tour and DP World Tour (formally the European Tour) and a few guys have won both money lists in the a single year. There are plenty of co-sanctioned events between both tours, even some not run by the tours like the majors. The difference here is an organized league of multiple events wants to poach players without any formal agreement with the tour about strength of field and cross-competing. Suspending people who play in LIV events was really the only option the tour had.
And then all of a sudden I find out that the PGA is essentially fractured and a competing league is coming up and it's nine kinds of high school drama.
It makes me realize just how much we all miss just going through our lives, even if we try to keep relatively informed.
my buddy is pretty far left leaning and some of the stuff he's tasked with designing really blows his mind heh. ...probably why he smokes so much.
The problem a lot of start ups face is overcoming the barrier to entry, either in terms of dollars or who you know. It's disheartening that the lesson here might just be that, even with all the problems with a group like the PGA, you need to have the backing of an entire kingdom to disrupt a space.
Plus, lots of leagues launch - the players are there. In recent memory, there was the XFL (3 times!), AAF, USFL, etc. and they were all able to field teams. But then if they fold, it is because of money. Sports usually gets most of their money from TV rights fees. It's a little of an chicken and an egg problem around stations only wanting to pay big bucks for content that draws ratings, people who will only tune in to watch sports stars and leagues who need TV money to afford to pay stars. If no one is making money, then what's the point?
The LIV tour went after people with name value right away & their goal is not necessarily to make money (right now).
LIV also has truly obscene amount of money to throw around. They are paying guys more than their career earnings to join. LIV doesn't have to worry about revenue sources or a sustainable business model because there isn't any chance they have either.
Tour cards are limited to about 250 as well, with each field being about 150 (it varies), so the money is split by a much smaller pool of players than any team sport, where an NFL team alone might have 90 rostered guys.
I don't see how the Tour that is excluding people from participating gets to position themselves as the bastion of "fair play", especially when the motivation for that exclusion is explicitly to maintain a monopoly.
Not that I support the LIV tour, but this seems hypocritical coming from the PGA side.
“They’re scary mother (expletives) to get involved with,” Mickelson told longtime golf writer Alan Shipnuck for an upcoming Mickelson biography. “We know they killed (reporter Jamal) Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay."
[0] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
Augusta is likely the tour's best option to ban LIV players since they hate controversy of any kind so much. They already told Phil not to show up over his Saudi comments and if the pressure on the sportswashing stays in place until next April I could see them not inviting LIV players.
People are also calling for the tour to declare the Players Championship a major, and I'd be curious to see if that worked. If they can just declare stuff a major whats to stop a sponsor from buying one?
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-saudi-money-spl...
Then again, money and resources go a long way towards getting people not to think about morals. Witness President Biden’s upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia, even though he had earlier declared them a pariah nation for the murder of Kashogi.
Forestry wise, we have lots of woodlands as a nation such that fretting is rather uninformed.
It's like complaining about trophy hunting through state programs in Africa because of endangered species. It sounds good and gives warm fuzzies to stand in support of helping animals, but the facts are that it ranges from counter productive to outright harmful to the cause of helping endangered species to oppose those trophy hunting programs.
For golf courses, I doubt re-wilding is a good use of that space. It's often limited and surrounded my urban areas. Even where it's not, you're still probably better off taking large unused reacts of land and making them parks than you are repurposing a golf course.
number of golf courses worldwide according to you know who: 38,000, let's make it an even 40k
20 times 40k = 8 milliion acres = 3,237,485 hectares
“according to the FAO, in the year 2013, the world’s arable land amounted to 1,407 million hectares, or about 5.4 million square miles”
let's see: 3,237,485 divided by 1,407 million is 0.0023…
not roughly 2.3%. not one tenth of 2.3%. not one hundredth of 2.3%. one thousandth of 2.3% ! Evil Big Golf is is taking up potentially a single one thousandth of 2.3% of of the world's arable land, back of an envelope estimate
even if climate collapse were a thing++ this would do sweet fanny adams to prevent it
++ which it isn't, and we can tell that even you know that it isn't because you wouldn't be calmly suggesting un-serious ideas like this
Yup.
> not roughly 2.3%. not one tenth of 2.3%. not one hundredth of 2.3%. one thousandth of 2.3% !
Uhm... 0.0023 is 0.23% which is in fact one tenth of 2.3%.
If it's meant for people that already know the situation, then that's fine. But, most people don't already know the situation, so the mass confusion should be expected.
Lol, there's one guy complaining.
You understand that HN is an aggregator, right? This was an article by an ESPN writer on ESPN.com. His intended audience is sports fans visiting ESPN, not the HN crowd. Or are you suggesting the article should never be posted to HN at all? It got enough votes to be front-paged, so there are enough HN readers who do find it interesting, even if you personally don't.
If the first reply was someone explaining the situation, the top level comment would probably have received a bunch of up votes from people that also didn't know instead of down votes from people that now interpreted it as a complaint, because of the context of the initial reply.
This is one of the reasons the rules state we're supposed to respond to the best possible interpretation of a comment. Not only is it polite, but it leads to better discussion where we don't devolve into whether a comment was useful, when most comments can be repurposed with replies to become useful regardless of original intent.