An Infernal Meeting
of LIV and Sea
‘“And listen, Gandalf, my old friend and helper!” he said,
coming near and speaking now in a softer voice. “I said
we, for we it may be, if you will join me. A new Power is
rising. Against it the old allies and politics will not avail
us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Númenor.
This then is one choice before you, before us. We may
join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is
hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be
rich reward for those that aided it.”’
If the past 18 months told any lesson at all, it is that the PGA Tour may take nothing for granted. And nothing has it taken for granted more than its weekly visit to Pebble Beach.
Years from now when I lay dying, among the handful of memories swirling at the end will be standing on Pebble Beach’s eighth green. Several minutes before, I’d flubbed my tee shot, and my second came perilously close to the cliff cutting across the fairway. But for my third, I pured my Tight Lies 4-wood and guessed my slice perfectly: the ball fired off the clubface like a stuttering North Korean rocket, but a rocket just the same; curled just right of the bunker front and left of the green; landed short, and gently rolled on.
I think I two-putted for bogey. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that, as my partners and our caddies walked toward the ninth tee, I paused and looked back over my right shoulder: the Pacific Ocean to the left, framing a dramatic cliff atop which rolled a thin green fairway. For all the memories of that day blurred together or forgotten altogether, I remember thinking in that moment: There is nowhere I would rather be right now than right here.
Even for a game that offers as much introspection as golf, that feeling is rare. I’ve felt it only two or three times. Pebble dishes it out probably a hundred times per day. Pebble Beach is a treasure. It should be regarded — and guarded — as such.
And yet, Pebble Beach’s annual moment in the PGA Tour sun remains nothing short of an embarrassment. From a fan’s standpoint, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am remains perhaps the year’s least-watchable weekend. From a player’s standpoint, it fares little better: despite the presence of seven of the world’s top 50 players — including Jordan Spieth and 10th-ranked Matt Fitzpatrick — the 2023 Pro-Am mustered a strength of field beneath October’s Sanderson Farms Championship. And not for the first time.
Neither Pebble’s decades-long slide toward PGA Tour irrelevance nor that slide’s causes are news to anyone. Joel Beall of Golf Digest illustrates the dilemma’s complexity as well as I’ve seen. The Fried Egg’s Garrett Morrison tweeted a compelling solution, as does Shane Bacon in the TFE newsletter (subscribe here). But above all else, those decades underscore that the foundation of the Pro-Am’s irrelevance is the Tour’s indifference.
LIV has fed off that indifference before.
There are obvious reasons to assume that the Pro-Am would never take up with LIV. The event’s title sponsor, AT&T, would never go for it. Pebble Beach almost certainly would not risk associational damage to its reputation.
And yet, are the PGA Tour’s assumptions not what allowed LIV to emerge in the first place?
That LIV would jump at the chance to take on an event at Pebble Beach needs no explanation. And from a purely selfish viewpoint, marrying LIV would solve a lot of the Pro-Am’s problems. For one, it would no longer be forced to play middle child to the PGA Tour’s Farmers Insurance Open and Waste Management Open. For another, it no longer would exist at the mercy of star players who can choose to pass over the event whenever they want (which, at this point, is nearly every year). And attaching itself to a LIV-sized purse would create a level of glamor and prestige that the Tour, for whatever reason, has chosen not to commit. (This year’s Pro-Am offered a $9 million purse. The PGA Tour’s following two events, the Waste Management Open and Genesis Invitational, both have purses of $20 million.) And LIV’s 54-hole, no-cut format fits more cleanly with the Pro-Am’s three-course rotation and low-stakes, hit-and-giggle spirit.
Of LIV’s many faults, one is that its constituency overlaps comfortably with the Barstool Sports/Fox News crowd. Repulsive or not, it’s a constituency nonetheless — and at the moment, the Pro-Am’s constituency appears to end at the Monterey County line. And it would allow the Pro-Am to shed its reputation as pro golf’s smoking jacket.
Pebble Beach undoubtedly would take a reputational hit. Just as undoubtedly, though, the golf resort is a business. Its tee sheet would remain as full afterward as before.
None of this is to predict that the Pro-Am will get in bed with LIV, or even to suggest that it should. LIV is a cancer. The thought of it invading one of golf’s most sacred places is a horror. The point is that the PGA Tour’s hubris has allowed for consequences that, thanks to a failure of imagination, not long ago seemed unthinkable. None of its stakeholders has been more taken for granted than Pebble Beach. And as Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and others have proven, self-interested parties that feel shortchanged often do self-interested things.
. . .
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