Graeme McDowell’s LIV place is in peril – was it all worth it?

At the inaugural LIV Golf event outside London, 16 months ago, the unpinned grenades at the first press conference landed at Graeme McDowell’s feet. The line-up on the dais included the dead-eyed jock Dustin Johnson, the inoffensive South African Louis Oosthuizen, and a 15-year-old hotshot Thai amateur called TK Chantananuwat. In search of answers the reporters had one bet.

So, McDowell was asked to reconcile his position on the new tour with Saudi Arabia’s execrable human rights record. His answer kept running like a tap until he accidentally strayed into the domain of sportswashing – without acknowledging the practice by name, or meaning to imply that he was a subcontractor in that field now. His words were a matter of interpretation.

“If Saudi Arabia wanted to use the game of golf as a way for them to get to where they want to be,” he said, “and they have the resources to accelerate that experience, I think we are proud to help them on that journey.”

The question was passed on to Johnson and Oosthuizen, both of whom peeked out from their foxholes. “For me,” said Johnson, “exactly what Graeme said. If I was going to say it, I would pretty much say the exact same thing. I’d agree with what Graeme said.”

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“Yeah, there’s not much more to be said than that,” said Oosthuizen, looking for a free drop in a hazard.

In McDowell’s 212-word answer the word that grabbed him by the throat was “proud.” For expressing that sentiment, he was excoriated. The last question of the press conference was directed to McDowell alone. Rob Harris of Associated Press made a reference to the Saudi-led war in Yemen and the treatment of women and the LGBTQ+ community in Saudi Arabia, and put it to McDowell that he was now effectively working as “an extension of Saudi PR.”

In the build up to the event the players had been offered optional media training by Ari Fleischer, George W Bush’s White House press secretary – and, bizarrely, a persistent critic of Saudi Arabia, over many years. McDowell had tuned in to some of Fleischer’s classes on Zoom and the answer he delivered to Harris’s question could easily have been workshopped.

“I wish I had the ability to be able to have that conversation with you,” he said. “As golfers, if we tried to cure geopolitical situations in every country in the world that we play golf in, we wouldn’t play a lot of golf.”

McDowell’s performance at that press conference haunted him for ages. LIV gave obscene sums of money for the services of players who had a far greater cachet in the modern game (Johnson $150 million; Bryson DeChambeau $125 million) but McDowell had suddenly cast himself in the role of a human shield for the tour.

He was scarred by the reaction in the traditional media and on social media, and months later he was still swapping words in and out of his mouth, searching for a palatable flavour. On the Five Clubs podcast in February, McDowell spoke about that press conference again: trying to rebuke himself, trying not to resign from anything he had said; swaying on the tightrope.

“I said some things I’d like to take back,” he said to Gary Williams, his buddy. “Because they were the wrong things to say? No. I said them because I was trying to answer questions that, when I look back, were incredibly difficult to answer. You know, impossible to answer, in fact, to the point where I shouldn’t have even tried.”

But the longer he talked, the more muddled his answer became: “Like I say, I would take back a few of the things ... basically ... I wouldn’t have changed any of my answers, I would have just said nothing.”

In an interview on the Bunkered podcast, four months later, the press conference came up again, a year after the event, as if he still felt compelled to explain himself, or quietly seek a pardon.

“I tried to represent the tour the best I could at the time – answering unanswerable questions. Like I said, trying to do the best I could and failing miserably in everyone’s opinion. I look back at it and I should have went with the Dustin Johnson approach and just kind of went ‘Uh? Yeah, man.’ And kept it short and sweet.

“To my detriment, around the time LIV was kicking off, the more I talked the more you incriminated yourself in the eyes of the media, who wanted to incriminate LIV. I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed the first few months on LIV ... I found it very difficult to be comfortable in the environment because people hated it so much.”

The second season of the insurgent tour finishes at a Donald Trump course in Florida this weekend. The concluding event is a grand final for their team competition, a LIV innovation that the players profess to love. The individual order of merit finished in Jeddah last weekend; in a 48-player field McDowell finished in a tie for 29th place, leaving him in a lowly 42nd spot on the season-long standings.

In the final round in Jeddah, McDowell shot a seven-under-par 63, his best score of the season, but in 20 events since the tour began, McDowell’s only top-10 finish came on the opening week at Centurion. The upshot is that his continued participation on the tour is in jeopardy.

Only the top 24 players in the end of season standings, and the team captains, are guaranteed a contract for next season. All of the captains, plus Talor Gooch, were given four-year deals. McDowell’s two-year contract expires at the end of this season and there is no guarantee that he will be offered an extension.

“Being logical about it, I have to look at the list of guys and know I have to be vulnerable,” he said last month. “I will cross that bridge when I come to it. I’ve felt my mortality [as a golfer] before LIV came along. I’d been struggling for a few years. Right after Covid I probably had the worst 18 months of my career.

“I feel like I’ve been a good spokesman for the league and a good ambassador for the tour and hopefully there is a captain that wants me on his team.”

LIV were recruiting on the hoof throughout its first season, which meant there was a constant churn of stopgap players being moved along. This season, it has been a stable roster from the beginning. Relegation, though, was introduced for the bottom six players on the order of merit, but as it turned out two team captains – Lee Westwood and Martin Kaymer – landed in that zone and were protected by their exemption. Instead, just four players will be automatically eliminated.

In his press conference at Doral this week Phil Mickelson claimed – without elaboration – that there will be new arrivals from the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour next season. “There’s a lot more players that want to come than there are spots,” said Mickelson.

Regardless of Mickelson’s status as a dubious source, and LIV’s ongoing merger talks with the PGA Tour, it is easy to believe that they are still active in the transfer market. Any further high-profile defections would only increase their leverage in the talks. In terms of next year’s tournament schedules, there will be no crossover or compromise among the major tours which means LIV will continue in its current guise.

In the meantime, McDowell is clearly in peril from any potential shakedown. If it were to end for him now, would LIV have served its purpose during the palliative phase of his career? He would say yes, emphatically.

From the start he characterised it as a business decision. The terms of his contract were never made public, but in his terrific new book, LIV And Let Die, Alan Shipnuck established that Tom Hoge turned down at least $10 million to join, which was fractionally more than he had made in prizemoney during his dozen years as a journeyman pro. Given his legacy achievements it is hard to imagine that McDowell was offered less than that.

Even though McDowell’s results have been dull, LIV is the only tour in the history of golf where you can stink the house out and walk away with outlandish earnings. In his last five years on the PGA Tour McDowell racked up $5,038,303 in prizemoney; this weekend in Florida he will exceed that amount on the LIV Tour in just 16 months.

“When something came along that had nothing but upside it was a very compelling opportunity at that point in my career,” he said on The Five Clubs podcast. “For a guy at 43-years-old, running out of time in the sport, it was a great chance.”

Nothing but upside? Does McDowell really believe that? Williams was obviously aware of approaches that had been made to McDowell about a career in TV, and he asked him about that; McDowell said he wasn’t ready for the commentary booth yet. Will those offers come round again? He lost RBC as a sponsor, just as Dustin Johnson did, and other commercial deals must have been impacted too. That had to be written off as collateral damage.

The possibility of McDowell captaining Europe in the Ryder Cup at in 2027 had been touted ever since the event was awarded to Adare Manor; that prospect is extinct now. “But that wasn’t a guarantee, it wasn’t a given,” he said. “I balanced all these things up, I weighed up all these things. It was a complex equation.”

Money simplified it.

Has the experience changed him in any way? In February he said that he “found out” that he took things “personally”; in June he said “I think it’s hardened me.” Either way, he’s wondering about what happens next. And he worries about his standing in the game. Thrashed? Salvageable?

“Is the game of golf going to be fractured forever? Am I going to be cast out on to the island of golf rebels? Is my reputation in this sport, that I spent 20 years cultivating, is that gone forever? I have to believe that ‘No’ is the answer.”

McDowell stood up for the biggest sportswashing project in the history of sport. That stain is immovable. Any other conclusion is delusional.

Life after LIV?

To pad out the field for the first event on the upstart tour at Centurion in 2022 LIV invited players who were merely filling a gap until some of their high-profile targets arrived. Eight players from that week have not appeared in a LIV event since, including three players who returned to the DP World Tour: Pablo Larrazabal, Oliver Fisher and Oliver Bekker. It is believed that their DP World Tour fines were covered by LIV.

This year, with no comings-and-goings during the 14 tournament season, relegation was introduced. The four players leaving LIV, including Brooks Koepka’s brother Chase, will be offered a spot on the Asian Tour – where LIV have invested $300 million in a 10-tournament International Series. There will also be a “promotions” event – LIV’s version of Q school – to introduce fresh blood.

Andy Ogletree, the 2019 US Amateur champion, finished last in the first event at Centurion, and wasn’t invited to play in any other LIV events that season. But he has rebuilt his career on the Asian Tour, is top of the International Series this season, and is set for a return to LIV next year. LIV is full of fairytales.