A new tour. Defectors. Indefinite suspensions. Blood money. Open letters. Martyrs. Mouthpieces. Vitriol. World Golf Ranking points. Tell-all books. Anonymous sources. Player policy boards. Lawyers. Mergers. Back-pedaling. Acquisitions. Deadlines. Team play. Elevated events. Watered-down fields. And a news cycle working overtime.

This is pro golf in 2024?

Who asked for this?

Who wants this?

Not long ago, keeping up with professional golf meant checking a leaderboard on Thursday and Friday and then sinking into your couch to watch on the weekend. Now, it’s a 24/7, high-stakes, divisive and exhausting version of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Following the drama of golf used to mean intently tuning-in to the back-nine of a final round. Today, it means reading 3,000-word think pieces, the fine print on legalese and endless social media hot takes regarding the latest shakeup.

Ask yourself this: What have your conversations around pro golf been about the last two years? And are they even enjoyable?

Golf fans are a particularly easy demographic to cater to. Put the best players on the same track at the same time and let us fall in and out of catnaps while we salivate over watching the usual suspects do something with a golf ball that we could only dream of.
It’s not hard. We don’t need the RedZone channel or fantasy teams. We don’t require manufactured storylines. And save for the Tiger and Phil rivalry of yesteryear — we never had to put on a jersey or pick a side.

Golf might be the one and only professional sport where its fans root for the game above any given player or team. And that’s the beauty of it, right? No one has ever stopped watching because their favorite player misses a cut or falls out of contention. Instead, we instantly reroute our interests and entertainment receptors to what else is happening in the field.

That’s all gone now. Or, at the very least, it’s quickly fading away. And what’s replaced it is the opposite of what made pro golf so attractive to so many people.

LIV AND LET DIE

It’s not that LIV exists or has an endless supply of questionably sourced money to keep picking off players from the PGA Tour. It’s that the leadership of every decision-making organization can’t seem to figure out what to do about it. And in the interim — which continues to drag out — golf fans the world over are the biggest losers.

It’s been very well articulated by numerous talking heads that LIV taking PGA Tour players has done far more damage to the Tour than it has done good for LIV. And, at this point, it’s impossible to debate the objective fact of that statement.

Has Jon Rahm’s signing with LIV changed the upstart league’s ratings or general interest? It has not. But has it greatly damaged the PGA Tour’s product? Without a doubt. And when you retroactively apply that equation to the defections of Dustin Johnson, Cam Smith, Brooks Koepka, Tyrell Hatton, Joaquín Niemann and Bryson DeChambeau, the problem only exponentially grows.

This isn’t about which circuit you prefer or what players you like more than others. This is about the fragmentation and lack of leadership yielding one product that is far less compelling than it was and another product that just hasn’t caught on, regardless of who it successfully recruits.

But what truly makes matters worse is that this bleak reality we’re living through right now has produced anger and apathy from the majority of golf fans. We’re either mad about what’s happening or we’ve been beaten into submission and simply can’t muster up the time or energy to care anymore.

No one can blame a golf fan for feeling this way. Following the current ranks of pro golf is time-consuming enough to be a second job. Beyond that, staying informed and having an opinion usually comes with some mental gymnastics and moral clauses, none of which any of us signed-up for.

Again, we’re a simple bunch. Give us the best possible product as often as possible and just let us enjoy it. We’re not here to read a new article every day or rewrite the formula for the Official World Golf Rankings. We don’t need to know Jay Monahan’s name.

Golf reporters shouldn’t be doing impressions of White House correspondents because we’ve allowed the game to devolve into nonstop, off-the-course drama.

Professional golf has quickly gone from an escape to something to escape from. What’s on television isn’t nearly as compelling as it once was and what’s on our computer and phone screens is even less fun to follow. It’s important to remember that in this dynamic, we, the fans, are completely absolved of creating solutions. We are the customers. They are the leaders. We give them our time, for free, and they get paid handsomely to make it worth it for us. Right now, it’s a bad transaction. And if you serve someone a bad enough meal for a long enough time, it won’t be long before they stop coming to the restaurant.

What we want is simple. And while providing it might not be, it’s quite literally the paid gig of the powers that be to figure out how to deliver. Sooner than later.