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At his best, Greg Norman is determined to the point of being dogged. One of the game’s unqualified greats, he was the No. 1 player in the world rankings for 331 weeks, longer than anyone until Tiger Woods came along.
With no formal education, he relied on the advice of a handful of people and mostly his own gut to create a portfolio of varied enterprises and become arguably the most successful pure businessman of any former professional golfer, above Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.
Even at age 66, he never, ever gives up.
At his worst, Norman is so stubborn that he can’t be told what to do — or in this case, what not to do, even if it’s to his short- and long-term benefit. When he believes he’s unequivocally right or has been aggrieved — or both — he will ride that horse until it’s no longer breathing.
In this case, Norman’s 27-year grudge against the PGA Tour and former commissioner Tim Finchem has led him to become CEO of something called LIV Golf Investments and commissioner of a nascent professional golf tour. The enterprise is being funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is reported to have $450 billion in assets.
LIV Golf Investments has committed $200 million over 10 years to the Asian Tour for a series of 10 events that could begin as early as the spring of 2022. In addition to those events is the controversial Saudi International, run by Golf Saudi, that was recently de-sanctioned by the European Tour and is now on the Asian Tour schedule.
This shadow tour is the latest attempt at a breakaway circuit that offers millions to the game’s top players. This is not the Premier Golf League or the Super Golf League concepts that have been floated and subsequently shot down but be assured that the Saudi ambitions are much greater than 10 Asian Tour events.
Norman famously proposed a World Golf Tour in 1994 that would feature a series of tournaments, separate from the PGA Tour, exclusive to the world’s top players. He was just as famously shredded by everyone in the game, including Arnold Palmer. Norman’s accusers maintained he was greedy and crass and disloyal to the PGA Tour that made him wealthy and famous.
Three years later, with Finchem as commissioner, the PGA Tour helped create the International Federation of PGA Tours, a loose affiliation of the globe’s golf circuits, and the World Golf Championships (WGC) events, four limited-field tournaments that featured the best players in the game.
It looked for all the world as if Finchem had simply blatantly and unashamedly poached Norman’s vision. He felt betrayed in 1994 and was livid in 1997. As with most grievances, Norman had the opportunity to admit defeat, take the high road and move on.
Here’s what he could have said:
I congratulate Tim Finchem and the PGA Tour on the creation of the World Golf Federation and World Golf Championships events. I’ve always believed that the best players in the world should compete against one another more often and that the cooperation of all the world’s tours was necessary to do so. I wish the new venture success and have the fond hope that it will lead to even more opportunities to showcase the immense talent of the world’s top professional golfers.
But he didn’t. What he might have said was: That little son of a b****.
Norman never let it go. He nursed, stoked and fed his self-righteous anger until it grew into a resentment that has manifested itself in what can’t be called anything but a vendetta. Now, Norman has Saudi millions to fuel his efforts, which could be like trying to burn a tall pile of wet money.
Saudi Arabia is on a quest for world legitimacy, not to be seen merely as a filthy rich desert state whose only global contribution has been its discovery of oil. And the regime believes sports are the quickest path, especially golf, which has an affluent demographic. They apparently believe that if they throw enough money at something, their ambitions will be eventually achieved.
However, bedding down with the Saudis has its risks. Norman has already contracted to build a course in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, so apparently, he’s not concerned with the regime’s despicable record of human rights violations and the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That has led Saudi critics to label the money it is slinging as “sportswashing,” using sports as a vehicle to divert attention away from its deserved reputation.
Norman is stepping away from running the dozen businesses under the umbrella of the Greg Norman Company to devote all his time, energy and focus to his new job, which is to convince the world’s best players to join a tour that could very well cause them to be banned from the PGA Tour. People think it’s too tough a sell, that the odds against pulling this off are so great that no one besides the Saudis would risk a dime on it.
But it was his idea all along, by God, and he believes that in the end he’s the only one who can make it a success. He’s chosen this hill on which his reputation — or what’s left of it — might die. Either way, best or worst, he’ll go out swinging hard. He couldn’t do it any other way.
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