OPERATORS of the country’s richest and most handsome golf courses were likely tripping over each other trying to impress LIV Golf commissioner Greg Norman to show that their course is the best in the country and the perfect host for an LIV Golf event.
Currently, two Asian countries – Singapore and Hong Kong – host LIV events, and Norman’s visit days ago suggests he wants to increase his league’s presence in the region.
His visit was cloaked in secrecy and course managers were told not to breathe a word. Should it leak, Norman, in his addled mind, must’ve had visions of swarms of Filipinos descending on courses and jostling to catch a glimpse of him in his shorts, in a golf cart, inspecting venues.
True enough, all the courses Norman visited had golfers in the clubhouse pretty surprised. Managers followed the mouth-shut rule, perhaps thinking this would be a plus when Norman makes his pick.
In a whirlwind visit equal to finishing an 18-hole game in two hours flat, Norman— heavily criticized globally for cleaving traditional golf tours using a multibillion-dollar war chest from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) — inspected Wack Wack, Manila Southwoods, Sta. Elena, and The Country Club.
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It could not be determined which course caught his eye. The golf courses mentioned are the Philippines’ pride: pristine, well-maintained, offering various degrees of difficulty that can potentially challenge such stars as Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Cameron Smith, Patrick Reed, Bryson DeChambeau, and Dustin Johnson who’ve all been lured to join the new tour with multimillion-dollar contracts.
Norman, 69, has been hard-pressed to find locations for his tour, traipsing through Europe, the U.S., South America, the Middle East, and Asia, in search of the perfect host to move that needle as his tour struggles for acceptance, having no TV contract and getting only moderate eyeballs.
In America and Europe, LIV Golf hardly attracts crowds. The same is true in Asia. Its only event that drew a following was that one held in Adelaide, Australia, home country to Norman and several LIV golfers led by former British Open champion Cam Smith.
But if Norman thinks he can draw big crowds with a Manila event, the former world No. 1, known as “The Great White Shark,” may be in for a surprise.
Unless he opens the event free, he’ll be lucky to draw a couple of thousands of customers. Why? The admission price is just sky-high.
A case in point is Singapore, which will host LIV’s May 3-5 event. The basic entrance fee is S124.74 or about P5,300. If wealthy golfers go for the full Monty, marketed as the LIV Premium, that becomes S4,136.22 or P175,000.
Now, what crazy and idiotic Filipino fan is willing to pay that much for a three-day tournament featuring golfers in shorts in a team game that nobody cares about?
Not me, because I can’t afford it. But even if I could, what kind of return do I get from guys who, except for a very few, hardly play the kind of cut-throat-competition golf that is the norm in a PGA Tour?
Yeah, there’s Rahm, Koepka, Johnson, Smith, and, all right, Phil Mickelson who many love to see make a fool of himself, but otherwise it’s a small field of 57 golfers consisting of 80 percent discards from the PGA and the DP World Tour.
Surely there are past major champions there, but most are past their prime and have joined the LIV tour — despite long and urgent calls from fellow golfers not to legitimize Saudi Arabia’s terrible human rights record — to ensure that they keep filling up the coffers in their latter years.
Guys like Sergio Garcia, Ian Poulter, Louis Oosthuizen, Martin Kaymer, Charles Schwartzel, Henrik Stenson, Bubba Watson, and Lee Westwood, are in LIV to fill their pockets. Well, what’s wrong with that, you may ask. Just this: What’s to watch in a bunch of players under no pressure of being cut, many of whom had to leave the PGA Tour because they could no longer hack it there?
Then there’s this: In a country where golf has suffered gravely because of backward and divisive policies from the National Golf Association of the Philippines (NGAP), a LIV tour is probably better than nothing because we’re simply tired of seeing the same old faces competing in our local golf tours.
The NGAP has so mangled local golf, we haven’t had a tournament worthy of international attention for years. Neither do we have a single world-class caliber player.
I only hope that if the LIV arrives, the host golf club does not have to pay for rights. The fact is, I think it should be paid for allowing LIV Golf to try our quite handsome environment.
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