ATLANTA – LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman took to Instagram on Wednesday to respond to the sweeping changes that were announced by the PGA Tour that ensures top players will be well-compensated and competing against each other more often.
Norman shared the viral meme in which Monahan fictitiously said to Norman: “Hey, can I copy your homework?”
“Sure,” Norman replied, “just make it look different so it doesn’t look to(sic) obvious.”
The implication being: Two months after LIV’s launch, the Tour has essentially copied the upstart circuit’s model with a series of elevated events for massive purses.
“A day late and a dollar short,” read Norman’s caption. Lee Westwood and Charles Howell III were among those who replied to the LIV boss’ post with crying-laughing emojis.
Except the meme also suggests that, under the new structure, Tour players now have it awfully good – and could be much less likely to seek alternative options.
And besides, Jordan Spieth said: “I still see a lot of differences, don’t you?”
It’s still 72 holes of competition. It’s (mostly) more than 48-player fields. There’s no league concept. No shotgun start. No silly team names.
“The more players in any sport that people want to watch, if you can get them playing at the same time in competition, it makes sense,” Spieth said Wednesday at the Tour Championship.
In a drastic change to the Tour schedule, top players will now commit to at least 20 events a year, including a series of 12 elevated events. That means fans (and network executives) can bank on seeing the biggest names in the sport together at more than just the majors and The Players – the Sentry Tournament of Champions, Genesis Invitational, Arnold Palmer Invitational, WGC-Dell Match Play, Memorial Tournament, plus the three FedExCup playoff events and four additional elevated events, will be part of this series.
“The idea that as players we can collaborate and get together to produce a better product while having stiffer and better competition, I think that’s just something in general that makes a lot of sense,” Spieth said. “It’ll create a better product for us going forward.
“We are going to try and get as many of the highest-ranked players that you can all playing as often as they can together, and it just seems like that’s the way things should have been all along.”
In that sense, Spieth said, LIV’s launch was a “catalyst” for looking at the overall Tour product and wanting to maximize its available assets. Before the rival tour emerged, there was a sense of, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – and it wasn’t broke.”
“It’s just now maybe there was a really good time to make some kind of a change,” he said. “I think the timing just made sense, and it was also provoked a little bit.”
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