The boss of LIV Golf says he would “create my own majors” if the existing events don’t allow players from Greg Norman’s tour to compete.
Perhaps the biggest threat facing LIV Golf right now is the fact its tournaments don’t award world rankings points, with the governing body that oversees the rankings yet to make a decision on LIV’s application to have points allocated to its events.
That means LIV’s players are dropping down the world rankings, which is one of the criteria used by the four major tournaments to set their fields.
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As the reigning Open champion, Australia’s Cameron Smith is exempt into all four majors for the next five years, but other big names will start finding their avenues into the majors blocked off.
Smith recently called the decision not to award rankings points to LIV events “bizarre.”
In an interview with New Yorker magazine, Majed Al Sorour, the CEO of Golf Saudi, threatened to take matters into his own hands.
“For now, the majors are siding with the Tour, and I don’t know why,” Sorour said. “If the majors decide not to have our players play? I will celebrate. I will create my own majors for my players.
“Honestly, I think all the tours are being run by guys who don’t understand business.”
Sorour ignores the obvious problem that majors aren’t just created – the youngest, the Masters, has been played 86 times, while the Open Championship was first contested in 1860.
The four majors are run by separate organisations, and the PGA Tour has been yearning for decades to have its flagship event, the Players Championship, recognised as a major, preferably at the expense of the PGA Championship, which is run by its fierce rival, the PGA of America.
As Golf Channel contributor Ron Sirak tweeted: “Majors aren’t just made up; history can’t be purchased. Meaningful championships are the product of time and tradition.”
Writing for Barstool Sports, Dan Rapaport said the development is bad news for golf.
“Oh man,” he wrote. “I’ve long wondered, and I’ve spoken about this publicly, what’s stopping the Saudis from, if the majors continue to hold firm, simply saying ‘f— the Masters, I’m going to have my own Masters on the same weekend and quadruple the purse?’
“There’s nothing stopping them, and now it’s clear that Sorour’s at least considered the possibility.
“Make no mistake: this is how a sport dies,” he added.
“If there are no events that are universally viewed as the pinnacle of the sport, and players decide that dollars are more important than chasing major championships, the public will cease to care about professional golf.”
CBS golf writer Kyle Porter proposed something of a compromise, where the majors could invite the top three or five players from the LIV money list.
Given the majors are free to set whatever qualifying criteria they wish, such a change could be the simplest way to avoid claims that the majors are missing some of the world’s best players.
Sorour also used the New Yorker article to address one of LIV Golf’s biggest controversies to date, Phil Mickelson’s infamous interview where he referred to the Saudis as “scary motherf—ers.”
According to the New Yorker, that comment left LIV Golf “on the brink of folding.”
“I called the boss, I said, ‘Everyone’s walking away. Do you want to do it, or not?'” Sorour said.
He added that the reply from Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the governor of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, was: “Get the biggest mediocres, get the ten that we have, get you and I, and let’s go play for twenty-five million dollars.”
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