From the outset, acclaimed golf writer Alan Shipnuck’s cards were marked by the powers that be at LIV Golf — the controversial breakaway tour funded by billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
During the inaugural golf tournament for LIV, held amid great fanfare at the Centurion Golf Club outside London in June 2022, he was all set to take his place for a press conference with the tour’s highest-profile player, six-time major winner Phil Mickelson. Then, he was accosted by a gaggle of security guards and physically removed.
Angered and irritated, he texted the LIV Golf CEO and former world number one golfer, Greg Norman, writing: “Are you aware that I just got muscled out of Phil’s press conference by a couple of your goons?”
Norman didn’t reply immediately but texted later, saying that he knew nothing about the incident — a claim that would soon be proven wrong.
In his new book, “LIV and Let Die: The Inside Story of the War Between the PGA Tour and LIV GOLF” (Avid Reader Press), Shipnuck gives the inside story of how LIV ultimately ramrodded through ethical concerns and resistance using its huge financial firepower to all but buy an entire sport.
“LIV is about many things besides golf, chief among them money, power and politics,” writes Shipnuck.
A few hours after the confrontation at Centurion, a damning video taken by another reporter surfaced online. It showed Greg Norman standing directly behind Shipnuck.
“His face [was] contorted into a soulless scowl,” writes Shipnuck. “I’d had no idea he had been standing right there, a witness to the abuses of his security lackeys.”
LIV was launched by Saudi Arabia’s government-backed PIF in late 2021 and it lured scores of top-name golfers away from the PGA Tour with the kind of bumper paydays they could only dream about.
Former world number one Dustin Johnson, for example, got a signing-on deal worth a reported $125 million while five-time major winner Brooks Koepka also bagged a $100 million contract. Even lesser-known players like veteran journeyman Pat Perez received $10 million for joining LIV. Perez didn’t seem to care where the cash came from.
“My money is in,” he said when he signed in June 2022. “I got it all. It’s f–king incredible.”
Like Qatar hosting soccer’s World Cup in 2022, LIV Golf’s emergence was seen as a prime example of ‘sportswashing’ — a p.r. exercise using sport to distract from some of more unsavory aspects of a regime.
But, from the outset, the competition was plagued by bad publicity.
The families of 9/11 victims protested outside LIV’s tournaments, including, most notably, at former President Donald Trump’s Bedminster, NJ, golf course in July 2022. Players publicly debated the idea of taking money from an organization backed by a Saudi Arabian regime linked to widespread human rights abuses, not to mention the fact 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi nationals.
But many couldn’t resist the lure of millions — or other LIV benefits.
“The money is the money but these guys are already making a great living,” Shipnuck said. “Some of them were looking for other things.”
The 2020 US Open winner Bryson DeChambeau, 28, who joined LIV Golf in June 2022, for instance, viewed it as an opportunity to influence how golf was run, especially as his attempts to get elected to the Player Advisory Committee had always failed.
The 2018 Masters winner Patrick Reed, 31, Shipnuck claims, saw it as a fresh start away from the many controversies that had dogged him on the PGA Tour.
And then there was Mickelson, a player who had long had issues with the governance of the PGA Tour and who didn’t hesitate when a reported contract worth $200 million was dangled in front of him.
For Mickelson, a “self-described gambling addict,” the cash would also help clear debts running into the millions, Shipnuck notes.
And, it was a win for his ego.
“Mickelson has always been a rascal, a muckraker, and a s–t stirrer,” writes Shipnuck. “Now the Saudis had validated all his maverick tendencies by offering to make him the centerpiece of the kind of transformational change to the golf world he had always craved.”
In general, Shipnuck writes elsewhere, “To really embrace LIV, it took an iconoclast, players who weren’t afraid of criticism or bucking the system, especially when there’s so much publicity and pressure,”
Pro golfer Harry Higgs put it more succinctly in an interview with Golfweek in January 2023, remarking that LIV Golf had taken “all the a**holes and villains” away from the PGA Tour.
Norman, who joined LIV in October 2021 as CEO, had his own reasons — beyond the money — for being part of it.
In 1994, he had tried and failed to set up his own world golf tour but the rejection from both players and the game’s administrators had rankled and, it seems, only spurred him on to do whatever was needed to make LIV Golf a winner.
But not everyone was on board. Leading American stars Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas Spain’s Masters champion Jon Rahm were steadfast in their refusal to jump ship.
And Tiger Woods, despite being ravaged by injuries, even turned down a reported offer of $700-$800 million to join the LIV ranks.
But it was Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy who became the face of the resistance, arguing, in November 2022, that Norman should step down and allow “adults’ to negotiate a way forward.
“Rory put his entire professional life on the line — he made it personal,” adds Shipnuck. “And there was a lot of ill will towards him from the LIV guys.”
Greg Norman accused him of being “brainwashed” by the PGA Tour in an article in The Washington Post in June 2022, and McIlroy dug in. “I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to make it my business now to be as much of a pain in his arse as possible’,” he says in the book.
What followed was an unholy mess.
As LIV’s tournaments continued across the world, broadcast only on YouTube and Facebook, players were suspended from the PGA Tour or resigned their memberships so they could join LIV. Some were excluded from playing in the Ryder Cup and others shunned by their sponsors.
Pro golf had been split down the middle and there seemed little chance of reconciliation.
But, in early June, a stunning and shocking truce was announced.
Following a clandestine meeting between PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan and LIV Governor Yasir Al-Rumayyan in Venice,Italy, in May, the parties reconvened on the evening of May 29, at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, Calif., to thrash out the framework of a deal that would see LIV all but merge with the PGA Tour.
The rationale was clear, Shipnuck said. The PGA Tour “was desperate for LIV’s lawyers to stand down and get their “hands on the Public Investment Fund’s cash” while LIV “craved the legitimacy that would come with partnering with the Tour, as well as leveraging their distribution channels and corporate partners.
“Glasses were raised to a cease-fire and the endless possibilities of the future,” writes Shipnuck. “A new world order had arrived for professional golf, and maybe a dozen people on the planet knew it.”
Shipnuck doesn’t think it’s anything to celebrate.
“In less than a year, from the launch of LIV Golf, and all the controversy and criticism, the PGA Tour was forced into this armistice and are now welcoming them into the fold,” he said.
“Sadly, the insidious thing about sportswashing is that it works.”
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