LIV Golf experiment was doomed right from its ill-conceived inception

Now that it’s collapsed, you can look back and see the exact moment Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf experiment failed – June 8, 2022.

That’s when Phil Mickelson did his introductory news conference for the golf league. At that point, Mickelson was its big get. Tiger Woods Jr. Slope-Shouldered Captain America. Plainly, the winds of change were blowing.

It wasn’t the greatest backdrop for a debut. At that point, Mickelson had been hiding out for months after making the mistake of being honest.

On the topic of leaving the PGA for LIV, he’d told his biographer: “We know they killed [Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”

It was big news. In many cases, it was the first thing people had heard about LIV.

In order for the presser to go smoothly, Mickelson had to avoid saying a few words, two of which were “human” and “rights.”

So here he is: “I said earlier, I don’t condone human-rights violations. I don’t know how I can be any more clear.”

He said it with an air of patient exasperation, like he couldn’t believe people kept asking. Let’s stick to the important topics, guys. More backswing questions, please.

And that was it. You knew this thing was cooked.

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The whole point of LIV was figuring a way to get past annoying questions about who gets to drive a car, and who gets chopped up in the consulate in Turkey, and so on and so forth. And you decide to kick it off by flashing the Amnesty International bat signal?

The Saudis operate several sports businesses that have very little to do with sports. They have a soccer league no one cares about, a boxing concern no one discusses and an F1 race that functions like a travelling orgy.

Aside from being spectacles, what do those things have in common? No one’s talking about human rights. Nobody would bother to raise the question. And so those things are succeeding at the Saudis’ only sports goal – making their regime seem less weird. From Day 1, LIV had blown its mission.

Then there was the show itself – abysmal. It started with LIV’s recruitment strategy. Bring me your most bro-y, backward-baseball-cap-wearing, mirrored-aviators-owning, plainly venal types. If he’s a nice guy that women and kids like, LIV’s take seemed to be that the PGA could keep him.

Cued up by Mickelson, all these knuckleheads had to answer questions they couldn’t answer, and failed at it spectacularly. After being worked over in the press, most of them stopped talking.

The LIV crew would show up at the majors like a brotherhood of athleisured monks. Anything they said could and would be used against them. Easier to maintain their silence.

However, it’s hard to sell your exciting new startup if none of your salesmen will talk about it. I can’t recall a single one of them uttering a nice word about Saudi Arabia.

Still, they had their golf. LIV’s recruits were undeniably good at that. So they pooched that part of it as well.

This is a simple sport. That’s the beauty of it. You hit the thing until it goes into the hole. Guy who takes the fewest whacks wins. A chimp could understand golf. One who knows how to use tools could invent it.

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What’d LIV do? Make golf complicated. Why were there teams and what did they mean? Why the shotgun starts? Why did everyone finish in the money? And what was that about relegation? I’m speaking here as if I watched a lot of LIV. I did not. Nobody did. Its audiences were often within the margin of error, and that includes live.

The whole thing seemed like what it was – the fevered brainchild of people who have so much money that no one around them will tell them that their ideas are somewhere between ill-advised and idiotic. Though they are different phenomena, the same principle that prompted George Lucas to make more Star Wars convinced the Saudis to fix golf.

Leading their charge was Greg Norman. Is there a more classic example of a stupid person’s idea of a smart person? I get why the Saudis bought his line, but that’s what it was – a line. The more Norman talked, the more obvious it became that everyone involved had made a terrible mistake.

They couldn’t even get their Schadenfreude right. It should have been fun to watch all these grasping wretches pull each other’s careers underwater. But most were able to skate away. After a little light self-flagellation, Brooks Koepka and Patrick Reed were allowed to rejoin the PGA. A bunch of others are being lined up to join the European Tour. Eventually, all will be readmitted to the temple. How else could they function as cautionary tales?

After weeks spent trying to lure new investment to the enterprise (/cue laugh track), LIV has accepted defeat. Following a short court proceeding, it’s headed for liquidation. If you’re looking to buy branded balls in bulk, check out eBay Riyadh.

LIV joins the WHA, the USFL, the NASL and a whole bunch of other fading acronyms in the sports-league graveyard. The others did at least have imagination. They were about something. Not LIV. It was born of pure greed. The only thing it had going for it was nothing.

The only top pro this thing is taking down with it is Mickelson. Since joining LIV, his life and his golf have both gone sideways. He got thrown out of his own club, reportedly for harassing a female member of staff. He’s recently out of rehab, and back in seclusion. At 56, does he have another third act in him?

An unsolicited word of advice – whatever Mickelson does decide to do, maybe no need to hold a press conference.