Moving the Chains: Love It or LIV It

MaicLudwig1@schitwood1968gmail-com

The PGA Tour allowed Brooks Koepka to return this year.  

Yes, that would be the same Brooks Koepka who joined LIV golf in the summer of 2022.  Why would he do such a thing?  For a sign-on fee in excess of $100 million, that’s why.  Also, in lieu of playing 72-hole tournaments on the PGA Tour, he only had to play *54, which translates to 3 days of golf instead of 4. 

*In 2026 LIV adopted the 72-hole format.  Incidentally, LIV is the Roman numeral for 54,

 so don’t be at all surprised if LIV becomes LXXII.

For those unfamiliar with LIV golf, it’s a rogue (yes, rogue) professional golf tour funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund – whose assets are close to $940 billion – that is hell bent on competing with the PGA Tour.  

Offering lucrative sign-on fees such as the one given to Koepka, about four dozen PGA players followed suit – the list of traitors (yes, ‘traitors) includes Phil Mickelson, Jon Rahm, and Bryson DeChambeau – and left for greener pastures. 

The PGA Tour should have said ‘good riddance’ and left it at that.  Only that’s not the case, because despite Koepka turning his back on them, they made the unwise decision to give him another shot.  

Koepka’s return to the PGA Tour is part of the new Returning Member Program, established for major winners (Koepka has 5) who also meet certain other criteria, including a mutual and amicable departure from LIV Golf, a player’s familial concerns, and their ‘competitive desire’ – whatever that means.  

Assuming Koepka checked every box, which he apparently did, everything is hunky-dory, right?

Not exactly.  At least not according to fellow PGA Tour player Wyndham Clark, who says he is ‘torn’ about Koepka’s return and that it feels like Koepka was able to (sic) ‘get the cake and also eat it.’  Specifically, he doesn’t feel Koepka should have been allowed take a ‘boatload of money’ from LIV and still be able to return to the PGA Tour whenever he felt like it – a move Clark believes other players would have made had they known it was even a remote possibility.

Clark has a valid point.  Who wouldn’t want a guaranteed payday to jump ship if there was the chance of climbing back on board later?    

There’s more to be heard on this from both sides, of course, but this is more than enough for the point I want to make, which is:

I’m done with professional sports.

Every last one of them.  Because the lone professional sport I still followed is now dead to me as well.   

And in a way it breaks my heart, because I’ve been a devoted fan of professional golf ever since I saw a former U.S. Army sergeant (Orville Moody) win the U.S. Open and a disappointed Argentinian (Robert de Vicenzo) sign an incorrect scoreboard that kept him from possibly winning the Masters in sudden death.  

Over the years, I’ve followed the PGA’s biggest stars, going all the way back to Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, and Tom Watson – as well as all the various members of the supporting cast, such as Kermit Zarley, Rod Funseth, and Homero Blancas.  

But enough is enough.  That all ends now, and the Brooks Koepka situation is the only reason I need.  It’s a shame, because I always thought athletes should be paid for their individual performance, and no one does it better than golf.    

I have to go all the way back to the 1994 strike in Major League Baseball to explain what ended my lifelong love affair with the other professional sports.  An athletes’ greed for more money was all it took for me to say enough is enough back then, and now I’m saying it again for the last time.  

In a way that makes me sad, because my fandom dates back more than 6 decades.  I watched professional baseball when just the two teams with the best records in each league played in the World Series, professional football teams played an even number of regular season games – 14 – and always on Sunday, and the only possible 3-point play in professional basketball was a 2-and-1. 

I knew the rosters of every team in baseball, football, and basketball, as well as where each team stood in the standings (to include when teams were mathematically eliminated from contention).  I could recite the statistics of every player in all three sports – within a margin of error of +/- 3%.  

Today they have been virtually forgotten.  Because that was then.  

And this is now.  I’m giving up my last remaining professional sport as a fan: golf.  

Slowly but surely those players, statistics, and memories will escape me as well, no doubt leaving space in my brain to remember other things that I haven’t thought about in years.

Like the lyrics to old, long-forgotten songs.  Ito Eats from Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii, for example:        

Ito is an eating boy
He never get enough from fish and poi
He eat everything, he don’t care what
He even eat the shell from the coconut

What was I talking about again?