LIV Golf ensures players no longer have to earn it in the dirt, or even care for that matter

Who wouldn’t want to get paid for doing nothing? Or better yet, what if you could get paid by your job, even if you’re terrible at it? Get paid huge sums of money to screw up, to not be good, to not even try. For a lot of people, that sounds pretty good.

But for a diehard golf fan, that doesn’t interest me whatsoever, and to me, that’s what the new LIV Tour is all about. From what I’ve seen so far, the LIV Tour is paying some of the greatest golfers on the plant to literally play terrible golf. And while the golfers that have made the jump to the LIV Tour are laughing at us all, laughing all the way to the bank, and that’s their prerogative, golf purists see right through what they’re doing.

Without rehashing the controversy of the LIV Tour, here’s the way this golf fan sees it. The guys on the LIV Tour, especially the top players like Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Bryson Dechambeau, got huge paydays, paydays even the likes of Tiger Woods could have never imagined, to literally stop being a full-time professional golfer. They got massive paydays up front, to do nothing more than show up at a 54-hole tournament, 8-10 times a year. They don’t have to do anything else. They don’t have to practice if they don’t want, they don’t have to play well at all to earn their check, and, for probably the first time in their great careers, they don’t even have to care.

To make money, the LIV Tour doesn’t even require its players to care about their games, their physical conditioning, the fans, or even themselves. Why? Because the money is already in the bank. The 200-plus million dollars Dustin Johnson got to play on the LIV Tour means he never has to win another golf tournament again, he doesn’t even have to place in the Top 25 ever again, and he will still have gotten more money from the Saudi’s then he had earned in his entire PGA Tour career prior to jumping to LIV.

Now, I’m not suggesting that I know for a fact that DJ or Bryson doesn’t care. In fact, I’m sure they do. What I’m saying is, they no longer have to care. They could quit the game altogether tomorrow, and their grandkids are set for life thanks to the money they took from the LIV Tour. And took is the key words. They didn’t earn it by actually playing golf.

That sounds pretty good, right? Well, if you’re a world-class golfer who could get an offer from LIV, sure that deal might be great. But to the fans, of which I am one, I just don’t see how LIV is appealing at all.

Yes, across the board, professional athletes get paid gobs and gobs of money, and the contracts just keep getting bigger. But, in a lot of ways, at least they do earn it. We now know more than ever the utter hell that NFL players put their bodies through. Same with the NHL. We’ve watched the grind of an NBA season, or the the marathon of a 162-game major league baseball year. We know the players in those sports put in the work, at least. We can watch it all unfold.

Golf has even been more unique in how they grind. While purses have exploded during the Tiger Woods’ era, golfers still had to go out and earn it in the dirt, as Woods put it at St. Andrews earlier this week. Some make it, some don’t. But either way, golfers have always earned it. They grind on the range, they grind on the practice rounds, they grind traveling, they grind through hotels, week-after-week, country-to-country, course-to-course, the life of a pro golfer was always something to admire, because, they really did earn their paycheck.

Play well, get paid, play poorly, not so much. Play a lot, get more chances to get paid, play less, not so much. That’s always been the way of professional golf.

LIV however, eliminated all of that. Pat Perez and Patrick Reed at least admitted it. They admitted the allure of getting paid to do less was the motivation. At least they were honest. As Justin Thomas put it, very few players have had the, let’s say, “fortitude” to admit that’s why they went to LIV. Instead most, including a completely washed up Phil Mickelson, have lied about why they did it at every turn. Most LIV players talk about taking on the establishments, being rebels, or advancing the game through a new format, or other completely wrong and outright lies to justify why they did it. Thankfully though, they’re so transparent, they might as well be liquid at this point.

They all did it for the money, and Mickelson is the best example of that. Mickelson, through two LIV events, has finished a combined 22 over par. He’s been atrocious, non-competitive, not even close to the class of player we’ve come to expect from professional golf. And yet, he already banked the money LIV gave him to play on the tour. His scores, for the first time in his career, do not matter. Nothing matters for Phil as long as he shows up to the events. That’s all he has to do.

And so that’s the way I actually see the LIV Tour. In the immortal words of Dire Straits, the LIV Tour is really “Money For Nothing” and while that is probably appealing to most of us regular schmoes who are out here grinding to earn a living in whatever we all do, to all pure golf fans, as we watch The Open at the Home of Golf this weekend, “Money for Nothing” on the LIV Tour is exactly the opposite of why we all love to watch the great game.

We want to see them earn it in the dirt.