Six-time major winner Nick Faldo again blasts LIV, says its pros are ‘soft’

Nick Faldo says LIV Golf pros “have gone soft” without a cut in their events and that the league’s business model is questionable, continuing his assault against the league now playing its fourth season. 

Speaking to Brian T. Smith of TalkSport, the six-time major winner also said that LIV Golf should “do their own thing” in discussing a potential reunification in men’s pro golf as part of a deal between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, LIV’s backer. But perhaps his most pointed thoughts were directed at LIV’s no-cut format, which guarantees its pros a payday. 

“I saw it many a time,” Faldo said to TalkSport. “The guys would fist-pump — I made the cut, I still have a chance to win. That’s more important than, ‘Oh, thanks very much. I’ll waltz around for 54 holes and I’ve got a guaranteed check.’ That’s not sport. It’s not good for you, that sort of thing. 

“Sport is bloody tough. The fear of failure is just as powerful as the quest to win. And I think when you’re on a fail-free tour, you can’t fail. It makes you go soft. I think some of those players have gone soft.”

Notably, in the wake of LIV’s formation, the PGA Tour has moved events to a no-cut format. There are now eight that play this way — the Sentry, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the RBC Heritage, the Truist Championship, the Travelers Championship, the FedEx St. Jude Championship, the BMW Championship and the Tour Championship. 

In the interview with TalkSport, Faldo also wondered about LIV’s business model and called the tour’s players “the luckiest things in the world.”

“I say the players are the luckiest things in the world, because you’ve got guys we’ve hardly heard of, who’ve never won, playing in $20 million tournaments,” Faldo said. 

“You’ve got guys who are into their careers getting 10 times what they would earn on tour, guaranteed. And then you’ve got these couple of guys getting paid an absolute fortune, and they haven’t moved a needle, really. So, hey, good luck to them. Go and do their own thing.”

The comments continue a series of jabs from Faldo toward LIV. Ahead of the 2023 Masters, Faldo had this to say, in an interview with the Telegraph:

“I’m not against them,” Faldo said. “They decided the grass is greener on their tour. Fine. The gripes I get is when he [Norman] said these things about doing it to grow the game of golf. We’ve all been here 40 years or more, hang on, mate. The fact is they got a ridiculous cash offer, which for some of them was the right thing to do. 

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“But as we said, it’s gone very quiet. So good luck with changing the game.”

Then last September, in an interview with the PA News Agency, Faldo jabbed LIV TV ratings, seemingly citing a tweet that said the CW Network’s broadcast of LIV Golf’s Greenbrier tournament drew a smaller audience than ESPN’s broadcast of a professional pickleball event. In the Greenbrier tournament, Brooks Koepka defeated Jon Rahm in a playoff to win.

“I think we are now seeing that, wow, they’ve had three seasons and they haven’t made much impact on the [viewing] numbers,” Faldo said in the story. “Quite amusingly, pickleball was bigger than their two stars in a playoff, the sort of excitement everyone wants. But it got beat for viewership by pickleball.

“I think bottom line is that the players have got the last laugh because they are being rewarded so much either through the size of the prize money or appearance fees and they are not moving the needle. And I can’t see that changing because, as we know, it’s been so damaging to the public’s attitude to golf. I still talk to my producer friends in TV, and people are just not watching. It’s hurt the attitude towards golf.”

Since Faldo’s TV comment, LIV moved its broadcasts to the Fox family of channels.