The jury is out on the excitement factor. All players, if asked why they are joining this breakaway, are under formal written instructions to respond with evasions including “I love playing golf” and “the format is exciting”. And be in no doubt, everybody involved in this gaudy enterprise is reading from a script. In the studio, Arlo White’s gushing commentary was as effective a piece of Saudi propaganda as if scripted by state television in Riyadh. Still, organisers did not stint on the portentous gestures, with a squadron of Spitfires flying overhead for the shotgun start. After 18 holes, the top of the leaderboard features such players as Phachara Khongwatmai, Hennie Du Plessis and Laurie Canter, all of whom would struggle to be household names in their own living rooms. But beyond this pod of whales is a disconcerting amount of plankton. In Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson, he has snared an impressive pair of whales, with two more major champions to come in Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed.
Greg Norman, LIV Golf’s master puppeteer, is using a corporate approach known as the “whale tactic” to try to make the show credible. Beyond that, it becomes a soulless exercise in avarice. For a day at least, there is a certain novelty in seeing Centurion, a corporate resort course beside the M25, offer an event whose prize purse is 66 per cent greater than that of the Masters. The only intrigue lies in watching a few phenomenally rich men become even richer. There are no world ranking points to amass, no Ryder Cup spots to chase. The essential problem with golf’s most bizarre spectacle is that it is not truly a tournament at all. And yet there was also sadness in seeing “Mr Ryder Cup” being reduced to a Saudi shill. You wanted to be seduced by the romanticism.
Now he was being paid an eight-figure sum to turn up to an invitational in his home county.
#Soulless gaze pro
This is a man who grew up just 20 miles away in Stevenage, who started out selling sweets at the pro shop in Leighton Buzzard. But as he signed his soul away to LIV Golf, Mohamed bin Salman’s project to annexe an entire sport, you wondered if he imagined his life flashing before him. Admittedly, his going rate is rather higher these days. From the double-decker buses in the fan zone to the liveried black cabs ferrying the players – we were in Hemel Hempstead, remember, not Holborn – every detail felt incongruous.Ī penny for Ian Poulter’s thoughts, perhaps.
The first tee was encircled by a phalanx of supposed Grenadier Guards, until one resident military expert pointed out that their uniforms were wrong and that they were merely hired actors from down the road. But yes, sport’s most obscene cash-grab has arrived, with all manner of ersatz accoutrements attached. It was difficult to believe that any of this was real, that what seemed at first an absurd proposition had finally been made flesh. Not that he knew it, as he gave a self-serving speech about growing the game, but his opening tee-shot here at Centurion was about to double as the starting gun on golf’s civil war. No sooner had Phil Mickelson swaggered on to the first tee in his aviators than he discovered he could not just bank £200 million of Saudi cash without consequence, as the PGA Tour banned him and 16 of his fellow defectors with immediate effect. Either way, a verdant corner of Hertfordshire has just borne witness to one of the most momentous acts of secession in sporting history. The Blood Money Classic, you could call it.
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