Unanimity makes me nervous.
Unanimity in the media makes me wonder what’s being overlooked.
With all the righteous posturing about the Saudi-backed LIV golf league, the nonprofit PGA Tour has its own Greek chorus singing its praises in the form of the national media. Talking heads on TV and columnists in print and online are all in agreement that LIV is bad, and the PGA Tour is unqualified good.
To be sure, the Saudi Arabian monarchy is not an organization that shares many values with American democracy. The lack of political accountability is most troublesome, but the Saudis get more flack from American journalists for their refusal to adhere to modern Western sensibilities on sexual mores.
Still, in the eight years the PGA Tour-affiliated Saudi Invitational was held in Saudi Arabia, I can’t recall once reading or hearing the phrase “sportswashing” - the practice of using sports to improve one’s public image.
It was only when the Saudis launched the LIV Tour and began offering appearance fees to top pro golfers that all of a sudden the Saudis displaced the Russians as foreign enemy No. 1.
Many of the questions about the appropriateness of taking Saudi money to play golf are fair - particularly from an American perspective. Do you want to promote a regime that denies everyone but Muslims the right to freely practice their faith? That allows no public criticism of the government? That only recently granted women the right to drive, and still holds them legally subservient to their husbands or fathers?
But these questions were just as relevant two years ago, when the Asia Tour - an affiliate of the PGA Tour - was sponsoring the Saudi Invitational, and nobody was asking American and European golfers why they played that event.
The hypocrisy is a bit much.
More to the point, there are important questions about the PGA Tour that are not being asked - apparently in some sort of self-adopted “solidarity” among members of the media with the U.S.-based PGA Tour.
The PGA Tour is organized as a nonprofit membership organization - one that broke away from the Professional Golfer’s Association that birthed it in 1968, as the top-echelon Tour players didn’t want to share financial proceeds or voting control of their organization with teaching pros that made (and make) up the bulk of the PGA membership. Professional golfers who have earned their Tour card - either through qualifying school (before 2013), or finishing near the top of the minor league Korn Ferry Tour - are not employees of the Tour. They receive no salary nor benefits from the Tour - other than the right to compete in Tour-sanctioned tournaments.
While Major League Baseball is, rightly, coming under congressional and media scrutiny for the below minimum wage pay offered to Minor League ballplayers, somehow the PGA Tour is escaping any attention for the fact that young golfers scrambling to make it on Tour not only receive no financial support, but many are losing money in the process.
A pro golfer on the PGA Tour is responsible for all their own expenses - travel to and from a tournament site, room and board, meals, hiring a caddy.
The only money to be made on the PGA Tour is by finishing high enough in a tournament to qualify for winnings.
Many a struggling young golfer just out of college is either taking out loans, living off their parents’ support, or spending their own life savings just to survive week to week. If they miss the cut, they typically don’t get a check at all - and may be out several thousand dollars for the weekend after airfare or gas, hotel, and meals.
A large number of these new golfers will not place high enough in enough tournaments to earn the necessary points to retain their Tour card for the next year - either sending them back to the Korn Ferry Tour or giving up their dream of playing pro golf. (And the players on the Korn Ferry Tour are in as tough a spot as those on Tour.) Many will end up taking jobs at a golf course or country club as a teaching pro simply to earn a living.
The LIV Tour offers each of its golfers a salary, plus the opportunity to win money at its tournaments. True, the LIV Tour is mostly skipping the younger players (outside a handful of top prospects), but the basic premise of paying its players is one it’s hard to argue with.
The PGA Tour’s argument that it’s model represents an ideal of meritocracy is a bit much, when you realize that the Tour’s CEO made more than $8 million last year - more than all but one Tour player. And with the LIV Tour now signing some of the most popular golfers in the world, suddenly the PGA Tour discloses that it is going to increase purses at its more prestigious events by adding in tens of millions of dollars from its “reserves” in order to make its tournaments more attractive?
Nonprofit corporations are not supposed to have reserves beyond what is necessary to protect the stability of the organization’s mission - any money generated is supposed to be poured back into the organization, by law.
Where did these reserves come from, and just how large are they?
The national media seems awfully uncurious about all this.
While the lower-ranked rookies struggling to make it on Tour might not drive TV ratings the way Tiger Woods (still) does, they are obviously needed to fill out the 150+ player fields that help create the atmosphere of a PGA Tour tournament, that add drama to Friday’s post-second round cuts. At least a portion of the PGA Tour’s revenue comes from televising the first and second rounds of a tournament on Thursday and Friday - yet those players who help make that possible receive nothing if they don’t make the cut.
With the federal government announcing it has launched an anti-trust investigation into the PGA Tour and its decision to refuse to allow any golfers who play in an LIV event to participate in future PGA Tour events, perhaps some of the above questions will be asked. Maybe even answered.
But it’s worth noting that it’s not the LIV Tour that is making players choose. The LIV Tour simply put together a calendar of tournaments, and began inviting some of the better-known players to participate - and to pay them for their time.
It’s the PGA Tour that has said players have to choose between the Tours.
When you’re telling someone who’s not even on your payroll where they are allowed to go to earn a living?
That’s pretty rich.
Here’s an idea for either the LIV Tour or the PGA Tour: Want to set your Tour apart, make it more interesting? Give it an additional patina of eliteness?
Adopt persimmon woods.
Much as professional baseball still uses the more difficult wooden bats, while Little League, high school and college teams all use metal bats, adopting wooden drivers would force top golfers to use equipment that is trickier to master - but also once mastered, gives more control.
With complaints that modern balls and metal drivers are making too many courses play too short (leading Augusta National, Torrey Pines, and other courses that host major tournaments to add hundreds of yards in length), persimmon woods would shorten the distance even the most gifted pro golfers can hit the ball off the tee. That would force them to use their long or middle irons for their second shots.
It would restore a purity of the game that has become, on too many courses for too many pro golfers, a game of driver, wedge, putter.
It was once said that only God can hit a 1 iron - and most of today’s pro golfers have likely never even used a 2 iron!
I think it would generate interest - and it would certainly differentiate the truly great golfer from the merely very good.
A professional golf tournament is supposed to test every part of a players game: Their drives, their irons, their short game, and their putting. Right now, due to the development of modern equipment aimed mostly at recreational players, too many pro players can simply skip their long irons - once a staple of the game.
A persimmon wood has a much smaller sweet spot than a modern metal driver; the clubhead itself is much smaller.
But the giants of the past - your Ben Hogans and Arnold Palmers, Sam Sneads and Lee Trevinos - could shape their shots with a persimmon wood in ways a metal driver simply can’t. Metal woods are great at hitting the ball long and straight, but not so much at intentionally curving a shot.
And just as a wooden baseball bat hitting the ball makes a sound that no metal bat can ever replicate, so, too, does a persimmon driver.
My first job as a full-time, staff newspaper reporter came at the Chula Vista Star-News in the late 1980s. I’d been managing editor of an alternative quarterly magazine, and strung for a local news service covering the County Board of Supervisors, but this was my first time as a staff reporter.
I was given the lowest beat on the totem pole there: Imperial Beach. I.B., as it is known locally, is a tiny residential community between Coronado and the Mexican border. After the City of San Diego’s land-grab in the 1960s allowed it to annex “South San Diego” - a huge swath of unincorporated county land along the international border - I.B. had nowhere to grow.
And so this little enclave of middle class bungalows was - and is - known mostly for its fishing pier and a Navy helicopter base.
I covered the city council, the planning commission, and the school board there - plus wrote feature articles, and covered crime.
Since the Star-News only published on Wednesdays and Saturdays, it was near impossible to get a scoop on the daily Union or Evening Tribune. We learned to write in a style called “second day” coverage, adding more detail than the dailies would have on any articles coming out of a city council or school board meeting.
The reporters for the Union and the Evening Tribune were a decade to two decades older than me - and, in my youthful eyes, were accomplished professional reporters writing for a metropolitan daily. They were who I wanted to be. (It didn’t occur to me for quite a few years, until I was on staff of the website for the merged Union-Tribune, that if they were assigned to Imperial Beach, they probably weren’t the ace reporters I thought they were.)
One day I was at my desk in Chula Vista, about a 10-, 15-minute drive from Imperial Beach, when we heard over the police scanner that there’s been an officer-involved shooting of a dog in I.B.
I grabbed a notebook and headed over to I.B., arriving at the sheriff’s station just as the Union and Evening Trib reporters were pulling in to the parking lot.
We marched in together, and the Evening Trib reporter, who was the oldest of us, told the receptionist that we’d all heard about the shooting and wanted to see the official report.
I’d talked to the receptionist many times before this - she was a terribly sweet, somewhat shy middle-aged Latina who loved the sheriff’s deputies like they were her own kids, but was always helpful to me when I was looking for information for an article.
I don’t know that the Evening Trib reporter had even bothered to learn her name.
After he demanded to see the report on the shooting, she said, “I don’t have a report, but ...”
He cut her off, his voice stern and rising:
“This is a public record! You cannot deny the press access to this report! Give us the report!”
“But I don’t have a ...”
“Fine, that’s who you want to play it, eh? Well, you’ll be hearing from our legal department with a Freedom of Information request!”
He and the Union reporter turned to leave. He saw me still standing there.
“Are you going to file a complaint too?” he asked me.
“Oh, sure, I just want to look something else up while I’m here.”
Once the two of them were gone, I turned back to the receptionist.
“So what IS going on?” I asked her, nicely.
She sighed. “Since it involved a dog and not a person, animal control has the report. You can go ask Rollie over at the Fire Department - he’ll have it for you.”
Then she offered me one of her famous homemade cookies to boot!
I walked across the parking lot to the community service office, found Rollie, got a Xerox of the report, and thanked him.
On my way to my car, I popped back into the sheriff’s office.
I asked the receptionist, “So now what are you going to do?”
“Oh, they do this all the time,” she said. “I’ll wait until I get the FOIA request, I’ll forward it to the captain, he’ll send it to legal, and then we’ll wait the 72 hours the law gives us to respond before letting them know we don’t have a report. If they come ask nicely after that, I might tell them to see Rollie,” she smiled.
Got my scoop that time. And a cookie.
-30-