No expense spared with the short promotional film narrated by Hollywood actor Denis Quaid, who starred in The Right Stuff (1983), The Big Easy (1986) and Any Given Sunday (1999), this week’s newest golf event at The Centurian course in St Albans was more than eye-catching.
However, as they move on to delight the Portland faithful at the Pumpkin Ridge course and then New Jersey at Trump’s Bedminster, of course, the bad boys of the sport might consider the buzz they generated was almost exclusively off-course drama.
Did anyone really invest emotionally in Charl Schwartzel walking off with a $4.75 million individual and team prize? Did anyone scream at their telephone for team Smash featuring golfers Sihwan Kim, Scott Vincent, Jinichiro and Itthipat Buranatanyarat?
“Evolution,” says Quaid in the promo piece for LIV Golf. “It’s said to be the gradual development from something simple to something more complex. It’s the ability to change, to adapt, to acknowledge imperfections and emerge stronger. The evolution of the game you love begins today.”
Cut to a serious-looking tour-busting trio, Sergio Garcia, Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnston. This is the first sales pitch from golf’s kings of bling. LIV, the Roman numeral 54, the number of holes the rebel golfers played over three days ending on Saturday.
Sport on television or TV View is probably no longer the most accurate label. Streaming to telephone or laptop, YouTube, websites, Twitter whatever device you need to find the sport you want is how it is now consumed. If you want to see it, it’s out there somewhere and often not on television. To find the three amigos in their first Saudi-backed London romp, the only option to watch was to stream it on YouTube, Facebook, or the LIV Golf website.
But the official LIV Golf coverage didn’t show the best bits. On Friday Rick Strom uploaded five minutes and 19 seconds from TYT Sport. No never heard of it either. It showed American journalist Alan Shipnuck being surrounded on site by an insistent security detail, who removed his accreditation and ejected him before a press conference by Phil Michelson began.
Shipnuck is the US journalist and Mickelson biographer who broke the story of Lefty, the six-time Major champion, speaking freely on all things House of Saud.
“They’re scary mother f**kers to get involved with,” Mickelson said, according to Shipnuck. “We know they killed [Washington Post reporter and US resident Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay.”
The footage also showed the whole episode with LIV CEO, Greg Norman hovering behind the action observing, as though it was a reasonable response for “neckless security dudes,” as Shipnuck referred to them, to manhandle a journalist off the premises.
Maybe that was what Quaid meant by “the ability to change, to adapt, to acknowledge imperfections”. A graceless piece of inspirational intolerance from higher-ups in the Saudi LIV ladder, it came after the televised press conferences of Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter.
Uncomfortably facing the cameras, the two Ryder Cup players were unable to answer a simple question. Would either of them play in a golf event organised by Vladimir Putin if the price was right.
Poulter’s reply that he wouldn’t answer a hypothetical question seemed weak after a week in which the most interesting coverage of the event was the gleeful bulletins on Sky Sports news, which seemed to be enjoying the swirl of controversy and clear discomfort of the English pair.
It is appropriate to point out that LIV Golf is now a competitor of Sky Sports which was covering the other golf event of the week, the PGA’s Canadian Open with Rory McIlroy sharing the lead into the final round.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think we could play for so much money,” said the smiling Schwartzel on receipt of his massive winning cheque. Bless him, Schwartzel, the 2011 winner at Augusta National, collected more prize money from the three-day event than he had from the last four years combined.
That preceded an even bigger dollop of LIV Golf financial largesse as Yasir Rumayyan, governor of the Public Investment Fund, took to the stage. Tasteless certainly, implausible certainly, he nonetheless announced a prize of $54 million for any player who could shoot a round of 54 at an LIV event. Tiger Woods’ lowest ever score was 59.
As things have emerged, narrator Quaid was indeed an inspirational choice for the original voice over. The Tony D’Amato character in Any Given Sunday, played by Al Pacino, was given most of the good lines.
“I look around I see these young faces and I think, I mean I’ve made every wrong choice a middle-aged man can make . . . And lately I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror,” says D’Amato.
On Leinster and Ulster Rugby’s defeat to the South African Bulls and Stormers and a trophy-free season shut down like no other. Again, like D’Mato said. “That’s a team, gentlemen and either we heal now as a team, or we die as individuals.”
