Live pga tour golf3/2/2024 LIV has tried to exploit this dynamic by offering big, guaranteed contracts to players. The money doesn’t exactly mirror how many fans a player brings to the sport, as evidenced by Woods not being orders of magnitude ahead of everyone else in tour earnings. 184 player makes the cut and McIlroy doesn’t, then it’s the underdog who gets paid, while McIlroy gets nothing. But the PGA Tour has a (maybe surprisingly) meritocratic structure. 184 player who might make the cut and challenge the top of the leaderboard once a year. CBS pays millions of dollars to show events featuring Rory McIlroy, not the No. Those mega-elite players have always been the tour’s real draw. The crack in the PGA Tour that LIV sought to widen was the one between the tour’s dozen or two best players and everyone else. It was easy, back then, to imagine LIV cutting much further into the PGA Tour’s grip on golf. At the end of the summer, it added reigning British Open winner and freakishly good current player Cameron Smith of Australia. But by June, LIV was back on the front foot, getting not just whatever is left of Mickelson but also more recently elite players like Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau, and Brooks Koepka. The ensuing public-relations shitstorm sent Mickelson into exile for a few months and cooled speculation that LIV would soon poach a list of top players. Phil Mickelson then gave one of the most destructive monologues in sport or business history, telling his biographer that, yes, the Saudis “execute people over there for being gay” and have “a horrible record on human rights,” but that he was engaging with LIV anyway in an attempt to strongarm the PGA Tour. This time in 2022, LIV looked poised to do immense damage to the PGA Tour, the tour that has dominated elite golf since the late 1960s. In what is still less than a year since LIV started staging tournaments, the Saudi-backed circuit’s fortunes have gone up and down.
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