10 Tuesday Takes: The Masters goes mainstream, and 1 fix for LIV Golf

Hello, folks. Below is an assortment of takes, seared to a nice temperature for your consumption. Some of them are opinions I steadfastly believe. Others are thoughts I think I believe. Others still are simply notices that should inform you of what’s going on and what may be coming down the pike. Anyway, there are 10 of them. They’re all mine, but now they’re yours, too!

1. LIV’s 1 big fix

LIV Golf should restructure its $25 million purse payouts. I wrote about this in greater length here, but right now $20 million goes to the individual competition and $5 million to the top three teams. My thought: imagine how much we’d care about the RangeGoats if half the money was going toward a team goal.

Graeme McDowell’s best round since 2018 came in the final round of LIV Vegas, and earned his teammates some nice cash. But what if it earned his teammates an extra $1.1 million? That’s what would have happened if $12.5 of the $25 million went toward the team comp. Balancing the payout structure (I think) would automatically create an incentive for LIV’s players to care about the team format, which would do the same for the rest of us. There’d be greater angst with who is playing for whom, which players are playing best, and which are underperforming. You know, the things that matter in every other team sport.

Considering how much Team Golf is a LIV innovation and a Yasir Al-Rumayyan sticking point, it seems strange that LIV’s financial structure would disproportionately reward strokeplay competitors. Otherwise, we’re stuck wondering if Cam Smith’s Ripper GC is even doing the franchise thing correctly. (They’re not.) 

2. Anthony Kim: the embodiment of this weird era

Like many American golf fans, the first thing I did Friday morning was wake up and check out Anthony Kim’s score from his first competitive round in 12 years. Like many American golf fans, I was not surprised to see him shoot six over. 

But his scores were not a significant takeaway. The main point I kept thinking about was how Kim is the perfect representation of this moment in golf. He maintained just enough social relevance for LIV to give him a shot, which is what LIV does better than any other tour. (It’s not necessarily a good thing.) He was suddenly a chess piece we didn’t really know existed. He has returned with a bit of a scornful attitude, posting a video on social media claiming, “Hello haters, I’m back” — as if the majority of the golf world wasn’t rabidly thirsty for his return. A blatantly obvious narrative of that return is how he’s a father now and making decisions with his family at the front of his mind. Instead of returning on the PGA Tour, AK took the easier route, with more guaranteed starts and, importantly, more guaranteed money. All of these things — the money, the doubters, the family, etc. — are good and fine, but so little of it is actually about The Golf. Which we were reminded of when he finished DFL by a lot. 

3. Joel Dahmen owes Full Swing; Full Swing owes Joel Dahmen 

Coming to the golf world tomorrow: Season 2 of “Full Swing.” And coming to GOLF.com tomorrow, the first of many reviews by our staffers. I’ll boil mine down here: Joel Dahmen’s episode is once again the best of the season. 

Instead of a full episode focused on Dahmen and caddie Geno Bonnalie, like we saw in Season 1, Dahmen splits his episode with Wyndham Clark. The differences between the two are put on full display, as Clark broke through at the U.S. Open and Dahmen struggled through perhaps the most trying year of his career. But what “Full Swing” offers that most platforms can’t is what’s happening behind the scenes. In the locker room, on the private plane, even on tee boxes. For Dahmen, it was a battle of getting serious about his mental approach to the whims of the sport, all while becoming more famous than ever before. 

The episode shows Joel and Geno circling each other in different places, both wanting the same result but believing it will arrive in different ways. You gain insight when Joel’s wife, Lona, sits for an interview to talk about her husband’s mental game. You gain even more when Geno’s wife, Holly, chimes in with her thoughts from off-camera. The story they tell is one that happens in the background on the PGA Tour more often than anyone would like to admit. Kudos to “Full Swing” staff for highlighting it (and for Joel and Geno being vulnerable enough to show it). Spoiler alert: You might tear up. 

4. The Masters has gone basic…

…and that’s just fine! The Masters Tournament sent out its annual Taste of the Masters offering this week, a $180 bundle of concession goodies for those who don’t have a ticket to watch in person this April. Quietly, though, that email notification linked out to an official Masters Tournament Pinterest page. I believe this is the first time the green jackets at Augusta National have officially made content for the predominantly female social-media site.

What do we have on that Masters Pinterest page? An official recipe of the Azalea cocktail, the ingredients for beef sliders made Scottie Scheffler-style, and plenty of fashion inspo for Masters fans to dress the part. All in, it’s yet another sign that the tournament (and club) have come a long way over the last few decades as far as catering to new golf audiences. The Masters has always marketed itself as a truly global event, and this seems to be the most modern way of doing that.

5. The limit does not exist?

Allow me one pat on the back — it was six weeks ago that I reported on the scheduling/field size issue brewing on the PGA Tour, which is just now really rearing its ugly head. Because of the makeup of Signature Events and their order on the Tour calendar, many Korn Ferry Tour grads and DP World Tour grads have not received many starts this season. It is now March and they’re left wondering when being a PGA Tour member will actually feel like being a Tour member.

The Tour saw this coming, communicating to players in early January that they may force tournaments to grow their field sizes to 156 so that — like on the elementary school playground — everyone gets a chance to play. But when I contacted the tournament director for the Valspar Championship, Hollis Cavner, in late January to see how that might look, he asserted that his tournament had no plans of growing from 144 spots. 

Flash to this week: the Valspar will indeed have 156 players, making it very tricky to host two rounds Thursday and Friday before the weekend cut. Clearly, the Tour is getting its way in bloating these events to maximum capacity, and tournament organizers will be forced to find another 40 minutes of operating time in a fixed schedule. As we watched yet another tournament disrupted by weather and finish on Monday last week, I just, uh, hope Mother Nature plays nicely. 

6. Want equity? Prove it!

Later this month 36 players will find out just how much their loyalty to the PGA Tour was worth. They’ll earn Group 1 equity grants in the entity called PGA Tour Enterprises. Their names will be McIlroy, Woods, Spieth, Thomas, etc., and they’re going to get 80% of the initial $930 million bestowed upon the Tour’s equity system. 

That’s a massive amount of value on paper, and it still might not be enough to keep players from considering a jump to LIV Golf. In any event, I don’t really care about the payouts. I just want some of those chaps, who were (and are) soooo important to the PGA Tour’s bottom line start winning some tournaments. Or at least get a podium finish. Rather than looking dismayed at who has won this season, I’d like to ask: why aren’t the guys who are worth so much winning more? You want this much equity? Please go out and prove it again. (Yes, this take is bound to age horribly in the next two weeks.) 

7. Saudi money not just a golf issue

It’s been oddly comforting (for myself as well as, say, Ian Poulter) to see other sports begin to reckon with the implications of accepting Saudi money. That mental battle is exhaustingly complex, and is absolutely more simple for some athletes than others. (Rory McIlroy himself admitted this weeks ago.) But to see tennis stars, soccer stars, even snooker stars have to answer questions about lining their pockets from the money of an authoritarian regime is something that LIV Golfers are probably quietly enjoying. I’ll never forget Graeme McDowell unleashing a mess of vague receipts last summer — citing narratives and calling critical media “paid representatives.”

We’ve been down this road long enough now to realize what’s going to happen: just about everyone is taking the money, through one channel or another. And it remains troubling to me how nearly every decision in sports is now just an opportunity to fight over money. Every. Single. Decision.

Mackenzie Hughes has said it better than anyone multiple times now. But my exhaustion is such that if golf as a sport looks bad for the pursuit of money, at least now we can say it has brothers and sisters doing the same thing.

8. Good on ya, Joaco

I’m really enjoying Joaquin Niemann’s rise. In part because he’s making some staunchy people uncomfortable. But also because we put him on the cover of GOLF Magazine before he could legally drink. He had braces and acne and probably a size-28 waist. (He might still have a size 28 waist.) It felt like a risk at the time, asserting him as a rising star, but everyone who watched him up close recognized him as one with untapped potential. While he has become a bit of a lightning rod with outspoken interviews following his victories this season, I’ve really enjoyed it. Because when your play backs it up, you can say just about anything you want. 

9. He’s Mike Weir’s dilemma now…sorta

The beginning of any non-Ryder Cup year feels like a bit of an exhale, especially when the Ryder Cup plays out like last year’s did. It keeps us from diving into the debate of who will or won’t make the ensuing President’s Cup teams in September. But this year is no different. LIV golfers will be a storyline once again, even if they’re ineligible to play.

Niemann is the best international golfer on the planet right now — and playing like a top-10 player in the world — but captain Mike Weir cannot select him. All players involved, through automatic qualification or captain’s picks, must be eligible for PGA Tour events. Could that change, in the event of an agreement between the PGA Tour and the Saudi PIF? Perhaps. But hopefully Niemann isn’t holding his breath.

10. Brooks is coming (again)

Brooks Koepka makes me a bit uncomfortable. In part because sometimes he scoffs at fair questions in press conferences only to then go deep on really simple questions; he can be a tricky interview. And in part because he shouldn’t be able to flip a switch and turn on his game like he can do at major championships, or in the run-up to them. No one else seems able to. It’s his super power, scrunching the entire sport into a little ball like one of the Monstars in Space Jam. But Koepka does that. And he looks primed to do it again, on his own schedule. 

Koepka has played nine rounds of competitive golf this season, and has shot under par in every one of them. That might not seem like much, but it’s something. He’s got six more rounds of competitive golf ahead of him, bringing him to an even 15 before Round 1 of the Masters. Twelve months ago, he talked about getting just enough reps in ahead of Round 1 of the Masters, and then in Round 1 of the Masters he shot 65 and reminded us all that he is king. He could be on that trajectory again. 

Congratulations for reaching the end of this column of ideas. If you have a take you’d like to pass along, or if you agree or disagree with any of the above, shoot a note to sean.zak@golf.com.