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A full 11 months ago, the first LIV Golf event outside of London took place. There were a lot of questions. What will the schedule look like? Who is in which team? How will these guys earn their way to the big leagues?
The answer to the final question for golfers around the world has always been the Official World Golf Ranking, which awards points to golfers based on their performance in sanctioned tournaments. LIV was not a sanctioned entity in June 2022, so zero points were awarded. Notably, LIV failed to meet a number of criteria that OWGR normally requires from sanctioning leagues. Its commitment to hosting strictly 54-hole championships, rather than the 72, wasn’t quite a shining badge of honor. Also, it was too early. So, very early.
Now 11 months later, no OWGR points are awarded in LIV tournaments. OWGR, which includes a council of leaders from governing bodies across the golf world, has put off the usually lengthy approval process in the face of panic among LIV pros Greg Norman and LIV Golf.
When will OWGR sanction LIV tournaments? Will that ever happen? Questions linger about the sport. Little has been hammered out, and it seems to be bothering Phil Mickelson. Perhaps it is understood. Mickelson is the face of LIV Golf. According to reports, it was the highest paid commitment last year. And according to court documents, he was the first player to be suspended from the PGA Tour as a result. And for the past eight months or so, once his Hy Flyers team began to take shape, Mickelson has been more public with his ideas. He leaned more into the LIV product. This league is his future. So indignant that points weren’t awarded, he showed it in a test exchange on Twitter on Monday morning, his 15th-place finish at the LIV event in Singapore.
CBS anchor (and GOLF.com podcast host) Colt Nost has responded to a tweet From a pro-LIV account that stated “50% of the world’s best golfers play on LIV and it is the responsibility of the OWGR to appropriately rank the world’s best golfers.”
Knost’s simple idea? “Please put them on a list when you get the chance.”
In other words, Knost doesn’t think LIV has 50% of the best players. Of course, to make sense of this debate, you’ll need benchmarks about exactly how many and who are the big players. We don’t have it, which causes a lot of ranting on the Internet, bending definitions of words Great, elite And in the first place. Basically what appeared in Knost’s responses.
In the end, more than 30 hours after Knost’s original response, Mickelson knocked at: “Revolver. It’s not our job. The owgr’s job is to rank all the players in the world. Maybe they can do their job and spot it like they do in multiple rounds with hundreds of players nowhere near as good. But that would hurt CBS’s PGA revenue so the Leaders will not do that.
First-time users of this show will need a guide to keep track of everything Mickelson has to say. It is true that OWGR ranks players on many tours around the world. Twenty-four rounds, to be exact. LIV wants to be the twenty-fifth. The PGA Tour “revenue” he’s talking about is the arrangement between the tour and media rights holders, like CBS, which, as mentioned, is Knost’s employer. Tour signed a nine-year deal with ESPN, NBC, and CBS starting in 2022. He’s reportedly worth over $600 million.
For all partners involved, including companies sponsoring a Tour event, it is essential that as many quality players as possible participate. It all feeds into the value cycle. More quality players tend to earn more eyeballs from fans at home; More eyeballs means more advertising value in trade breaks and sponsors; More ads means more revenue for rights holders; More revenue for rights holders means more value for the TV contract. and the the next hold tv.
Now, is there a clause in the contracts based on the quality of the field or the quality players vying for TV revenue? We do not know. The PGA Tour does not make the details of its contract public. Has Mickelson tweeted about this before? Yes, it was back in March. It has also, at times, inaccurately assessed aspects of the Tour’s business model. Most notably, when he said the PGA Tour has $20 billion in digital assets.
Knost replied to Mickelson, “Respectfully, why didn’t you ever lobby for him [world ranking] starting point? Why didn’t you argue for points when you played with pga tour champions? “
In fairness, Mickelson and most of the LIV players have been pushing for OWGR points from the start. But at this point, as Mickelson made clear in his response, he doesn’t need OWGR points himself. He would play every major tournament for a number of years. It’s a battle he intends to fight on behalf of his fellow LIV players. Michelson argues that the lack of points is evidence of “collusion behind closed doors to help”. [Tour commissioner Jay Monahan] Getting all his TV money.”
It all ties into a context that Nost and Mickelson have known each other for a long time. They used to play the occasional practice tour together during Knost’s playing days on tour. They’ve gone separate directions in recent years, but at their core, they’re two of the best speakers in the game. They communicate their opinions and often enjoy sharing them. But in this case, we weren’t too far away. The conversation kept spinning, never reaching a conclusion. Knost kept asking questions like, “If you knew you wouldn’t get points, why would you take them before the round started?”
Mickelson kept talking about what he believed to be apparent collusion. That the OWGR’s seven-person board of directors—which includes presidents from the four major leagues, the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour—works together to keep LIV down. “It is clear to me why. Mickelson said in Al Jawhar’s latest tweet.
What eventually became clear was that this Twitter weighting would remain the same: Twitter back and forth. Knost offered the opportunity to bring the conversation to the GOLF Subpar podcast, but Mickelson declined.
He said “no thanks”. “I prefer tweeting the way we are,” followed by two emojis.