The last time the Ryder Cup was in the United States — Whistling Straits, late September 2021 — Phil Mickelson was in a Team USA uniform and Greg Norman was prowling the grounds. Shark was there doing commentary for SiriusXM, but all the while his mind was on another matter.
“LIV Golf,” Norman said in a phone interview Tuesday morning. “Well, not LIV Golf, because we didn’t have that name. Project X. I had been to one other Ryder Cup, but this time I was really struck by the passion, the U-S-A chanting and all of that. It was a home game for the U.S., and you guys had lost the last one.”
You had to bring it up! The previous Ryder Cup was the one in gay Paris (or its distant suburbs) in 2018, where the Europeans dismantled the Americans, 17.5 to 10.5. You may recall Tiger Woods, coming off a stirring win at East Lake, playing like a zombie there. He might have been snoozing during a team press conference. Well, it is understandable.
Anyway, back to Norman and what he took from that week at Whistling Straits:
“I could see for the first time that the American players had these associations, based on where they went to college or the pods they played in or whatever, and the Europeans had it because they represented the tour they grew up on. So there was this really powerful team concept and all this passion. And I knew it was something totally missing from professional golf on all the major tours. And that was when I could see that this LIV Golf concept could work if we embraced this team concept.”
As of this month, Norman has parted ways with LIV Golf. He was its commissioner and CEO from its start in 2021 until his contract expired last month. In January, Scott O’Neil became the CEO of LIV Golf.
Along with Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods, Norman is one of the most significant figures in global golf today. He was so closely associated with LIV Golf that you might have thought that Norman be given, at the very least, a ceremonial public role with LIV Golf for the rest of his days. But the break has been a clean one. Norman was asked if that was what he wanted.
“That’s something you’d have to ask Scott O’Neil,” Norman said.
Hold it, hold it, hold it: Was this really Greg (Let It Out) Norman on the phone from the Bahamas — or was it some expert impersonator? When did he learn to be so discreet?!
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” he said. “Over the years now, I’ve had a lot of conversations with the cone of silence down.”
You have to respect any member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, particularly one from Australia, who can make such an easy reference to one of the best gags from the hilarious American TV series, “Get Smart.”
When the British Open, the great championship of the world that Norman won twice, was last held in St. Andrews in 2022, Norman was not invited to a pre-tournament dinner of former winners, because, per semi-official R&A word, his presence would be a “distraction,” owing to Norman’s role as the face of the upstart LIV golf league.
Norman said that he had “heard” that Tiger Woods did not want him there, and that Woods told R&A officials that if Norman attended, he would not. “But I don’t know that that’s what happened,” Norman said. “It’s just what I have heard.”
What’s with this new, super-appropriate Greg Norman? If this is the new normal, there’s going to be a serious adjustment period for veteran golf writers, plus a moment of silence for all that has been lost!
Really, no matter what you think of LIV Golf, it’s hard not to think of Norman as one of golf’s most charismatic and significant figures. The decade between late 1949, when Tom Watson was born, and early 1960, when Paul Azinger showed up, produced a wide range of engaging personalities that led the game out of its Big Three years. Those golfers included Ben Crenshaw, Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Nick Price, Payne Stewart and Bernard Langer — and Norman, born in 1955. On a global basis, Greg Norman was the leader of that pack. Circa 1997, Woods took Norman’s place, occupying the game’s throne, circa 1997.
For 25 or more years, Norman has not understood why Woods has rebuffed all of Norman’s efforts at friendship. Norman’s affiliation with LIV Golf certainly has not helped. Woods is the vice chairman of the PGA Tour Enterprises board, he’s the chairman of the PGA Tour’s Future Competition Committee and he is a member of the PGA Tour’s board of directors. He is the PGA Tour’s ultimate Establishment figure, and the only living person with 82 PGA Tour wins. That massive number is an elemental part of his legacy.
Norman, in a 65-minute phone interview, talked about the role he played in recruiting Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau and Patrick Reed to LIV Golf. “It was the players, their managers, their lawyers,” he said. “They really didn’t understand what it means to be a global brand. I did.” He said one of the biggest challenges was explaining the potential benefit of team ownership, because it was so outside their experience.
DeChambeau, as an emerging PGA Tour player, appeared in Bridgestone ads with Woods, and had long driving-range sessions where they stood beside one another. Reed, by virtue of his Tiger-inspired red-and-black Sunday outfits and as a captain’s pick for Tiger’s 2019 Presidents Cup team, had a close association with Woods, too. Norman was asked if he ever heard either express any reservations about leaving the PGA Tour out of allegiance to Woods. “No,” Norman said. “Not at all.” He described both as independent thinkers.
“One of the things I admire about Patrick Reed is his moxie,” Norman said. “Bryson is very cerebral, always figuring things out for himself.”
Norman said the entire landscape of professional golf today would be different had Jay Monahan, as PGA Tour commissioner, been willing to listen to what Norman and his LIV Golf colleagues were proposing four or more years ago. “I think he was responding to it in an emotional way, and that’s never good in business,” Norman said. It’s an interesting observation, because as a player, when he was winning and when he wasn’t, Norman’s emotional state was on public display for all to see — TV cameras, fans on rope lines, caddies, other players. His emotional way helped him, hurt him and made him.
“Had Jay taken our calls, I think the ecosystem of global golf would be more equitable today,” Norman said. “You would have had private venture capital coming into the game, as we now have, but it would have been distributed to more players.” LIV Golf has 54 players in each tournament. Many leading PGA Tour events have gone from fields that, by tradition, once had 120 or more players to no-cut tournaments with 70 or 80 players in the field. Spreading-the-wealth, as a broad idea, is an interesting observation from Norman because, in his playing prime, he had been an advocate for a star-driven tour.
In 2032, the Summer Olympics will be held in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, where Norman was born and raised. He is on the 24-member organizing committee for those Games. He said, since his departure from LIV, he is focusing on his wide-ranging global businesses, which he said have flourished in his LIV years, when he was not actively engaged with them on a day-to-day basis. “We took a hit in the American market, but our business has been booming across the Pacific Rim,” Norman said. “The U.S. is a hugely important market, but world golf does not begin and end with the United States.
Norman said that, with his departure from LIV Golf, that he was going focus again on his work as a golf-course architect. He said he has a lot of work in Vietnam and expects more and predicts that the ban on golf-course construction in China will be lifted soon, and that Norman and his design people will be among the first through the door when it is.
Norman predicted that the Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black will be a fierce contest, much closer than the 2023 Ryder Cup in Rome, when the Europeans won, 16.5 to 11.5. He said the boisterous New York crowds could make a difference, as home-team fans often do in any team competition. He said he admired the American captain, Keegan Bradley, whom he described as a person “outside the system,” much as Norman was. But he also noted that the European team had two LIV players, Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton, both picked by the European captain Luke Donald, while the American team has only one LIV player on it, Bryson DeChambeau, who made the team on points. (Each captain had six free picks.) “I’ll turn it on, here and there,” Norman said of the Ryder Cup broadcast coverage.
Norman was asked what he saw as his greatest accomplishment as LIV Golf’s first CEO and commissioner. “Bringing golf to more people in more places across the world,” he said. That, and bringing private-equity money into the game.
He was asked what he thinks global professional golf will look like five years from now. “Nothing like what it is now,” Norman said. For one thing, he said, new PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp, self-described agent of “significant change,” will want that to happen, and private investors will demand it.
He described Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the Saudi business leader who has overseen a massive investment in recreational golf and LIV Golf, as one of the one of the most significant figures in his life, along with two unnamed lawyers, “one in Dallas, one in Miami,” whom Norman said played key roles in getting LIV Golf off the ground. For the better part of five years, Greg Norman was on a team. Now he’s going back to Shark, his fitting nickname and his emblem on a million golf shirts. Expect to see him around for quite a while.
“My mother is 94 and she’s in great shape,” Norman said. “I expect to live to be 120.”
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
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