The first week of December is always a tough but odd start to the holiday season. It’s the twentieth anniversary of my mother’s passing. Geez. Twenty-years. Then I’m also a stickler for American history, and we have Pearl Harbor and the next day, December 8th – America declares War. A fun little exercise I like to play in my head is the ‘What if’ game. What if Japan hadn’t attacked Pearl Harbor? We were primarily relegated to the sidelines before this and didn’t want to enter the conflict. Most historians think it was only a matter of time before we would have had to have entered the war. Pearl Harbor started the Manhattan Project and started the work on ‘The Bomb.’ What if we lost the arms race and the Germans got to the atomic bomb before us because we were sidelined?
Moving on….
John Rahm decided to cash in and go to the Saudi-backed LIV Tour. I just love all the people that are like ‘America First’ America First. The Saudis start a golf league and throw bags of money at it. LIV Golf First. LIV Golf First. It’s amazing how fast they forget who was behind and helped orchestrate 9/11.
You have to understand a few things. What do the Saudis want? From the beginning, the Saudis wanted a seat at the sports table in America. Baseball and Football would have been a tougher buy-in, and with the political nature of the Saudis buying into one of America’s sacred past times, the timing just wasn’t right, and they knew they couldn’t survive the political push-back. Where to start? Golf. See if you can join the PGA Tour. Overtures were made. Wanting to be an investor. Shunned. Wouldn’t even take a meeting. So, they started a rival golf league to compete against the PGA Tour. What people don’t get? This Golf League (LIV) was never meant to stand on its own, as the whole goal all along was to be a part of the PGA Tour. The PGA Tour has a legacy. Tradition. That’s what they want.
Case in point. It’s LIV’s year of buying all these players. Bryson, Brooks, Phil, Cam Smith, Bubba, etc and what ended up happening? They couldn’t get a buyer to pay for the content. So they end up coming to an arrangement to eat the production costs, and they put it on the CW. Suppose you ask the majority of Sports fans where the CW network is. They won’t be able to tell you. Ask how many tournaments they’ve watched on the CW. Most will tell you zero. Judging by the ratings charts, it’s true.
So why sign Rahm? If the PIF (Saudi’s investment arm) gets what they want, it’ll be a majority investor in the PGA Tour, and LIV can slowly disappear. If they don’t and the PGA Tour takes other investors, LIV and the PIF hold substantial bargaining power.
I also get tired of the PR people at LIV who somehow thought the way to approach this was to say ‘We’re growing the game.’ If I hear that one more time, I’m just going to hurl my fucking lunch. Or breakfast. You’d better not say that before dinner as hey, that’s one of the best meals of the day.
Whatelse is there?
Ohtani signs with the Dodgers for a cool $700 million. I wonder how much of this was about not having to move. 😂 Reading things, it looks like the contract is heavily back-end loaded in hopes that the Dodgers can field a team and be competitive before things fall apart when they have to start paying the luxury tax on this. We’ll see. Players have to perform still. The Dodgers have a history of being solid during regular season and then falling apart come playoffs.
Lastly…..
Thanks, Eric and Nicole, for being such excellent friends and for the enjoyable evening. Drinks. Good food. Cards. Banter. I’m all about moments with people. Making memories. Sharing stories.