The PGA Tour has won the game of chicken so there is no reason to flinch now.
This week's PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club outside Philadelphia marks the first time both sides of golf's formerly warring factions will get together since reports that the ever-flashy LIV Golf is soon to be broke.
The breakaway league has been put on life support after world events -- or disinterest and disappointment -- led the Saudi Public Investment Fund to abandon funding after dropping more than $5 billion into LIV over the past five years.
While the end of LIV's actual product is of little to no concern for the vast majority of golf fans, the conversation has quickly switched to where all these potentially homeless (but fabulously wealthy) golfers will go should LIV fail to secure new investment (good luck with that) and close up shop for good.
Of course, we don't actually know what many of these LIV golfers want to do in the future. Journeyman pro Anirban Lahiri seemed somewhat offended recently that fans and analysts would think he and his LIV colleagues would even want to step foot back on the PGA Tour, calling it 'the biggest joke ever' and saying at least ten of his LIV pals would rather retire than go begging back to the American tour.
Which makes some sense considering the 38-year-old Lahiri, who was never a factor at the game's highest level, has stuffed his pockets with $35 million of LIV Golf money despite having zero wins over there.
And perhaps there is a common element to many of the players who opted to take their talents to LIV Golf. After all, trying to be the absolute best in the world at something is a relentless, exhausting and almost always a fruitless pursuit that's not for everyone, expecially once reality sets in.
And there is nothing wrong with contentment, but perhaps don't talk smack on your way to the couch.
Or on your way to YouTube golf.
There has been a long-running narrative that golf needs all the best players playing against one another on the same tour. It's what the fans want and it's what the PGA Tour needs, at least that's how the story goes. LIV's megastars Bryson Dechambeau and Jon Rahm and a handful of other top players better hope that sentiment continues to exist, even if it's not actually true.
In reality, the LIV Golf experiment has proven the old adage that 'time is undefeated' as well as the popular meme that 'life comes at you fast' because the truth is the PGA Tour needs none of them.
Sports stars can seem bigger than life and omnipresent at times, but history is full of athletes who by injury, scandal, poor play, or simply no good reason at all, disappear overnight. Sure, some become legends, but more become answers to a trivia question.
And that's because sports, like life, waits for no one.
For the golf example, let's go back five years to the dawn of LIV Golf.
When 2022 began, a golfer named Scottie Scheffler had zero wins and could walk into any Chipotle in the world without getting recognized. The undisputed world No. 1 Scheffler notched his first PGA Tour win at the Waste Management Open four months before LIV's inaugural event. When LIV Golf was putting together its roster of hopefuls, he was a talented nobody in the golf world. He now has 20 wins and four majors.
U.S. Open winner and current world No. 4 Matt Fitzpatrick also had zero wins on the PGA Tour at the beginning of 2022, and his brother Alex was barely born yet. Okay, I made the second part up, but the point is that sports is a constantly refreshing ecosystem and to think that there will be some giant crack in the history of the game if DeChambeau and Rahm don't rejoin the tour is folly.
What do Cameron Young, Robert MacIntyre, Ludvig Aberg, Akshay Bhatia, Wyndham Clark, Tom Kim, Sahith Theegala, Chris Gotterup, Ben Griffin, Min Woo Lee, Maverick McNealy, J.J. Spaun and Sepp Straka have in common?
None of them had a single win on the PGA Tour before 2022 and all are now household names in golf circles.
"If you want to be the most competitive golfer you can be, this is the place to be," Rory McIlroy said last week of the PGA Tour. "And if you don't want to play here, I think that says something about you.”
The moral of this story is that it's easy for a top pro golfer to feel like they're the centre of the universe, but unfortunately for them, the universe is aways expanding.
