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Earlier this week Luke Donald and Zach Johnson hosted the One Year to Go Ryder Cup celebrations. They had a Champions Challenge and led two teams od elite Italian junior and disabled golfers at Marco Simone Golf and Country Club, the venue for the 2023 Ryder Cup matches. They had a gala evening at the Palazzo Colonna followed by a photo call at the Colosseum the following day.

Is more hotly anticipated and a million times more entertaining and authentic than anything that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are going to put on Netflix. What a year to film behind the scenes on tour. The first series of the Netflix documentary of behind the scenes on the PGA Tour airs in January 2023.

Based around the extremely successful Formula 1 hit, Drive To Survive, the docuseries will, for the first time ever, give access inside the ropes and behind the scenes of the PGA Tour, with the series capturing aspects like the intensity of training, travel, victory, and defeat through the lens of a diverse group of players and their support teams.

With a number of players already on board with the idea, as well as filming apparently having started back at the Hero World Challenge in December, the PGA Tour and governing bodies that conduct men’s Major championships – Augusta National Golf Club, the PGA of America, the USGA, and The R&A will provide entry into the sport’s biggest events, including all four of the Majors, The Players Championship and the season-ending FedEx Cup.

The producers Chad Mumm and Paul Martin spoke on the No laying Up podcast. Here’s some of what they had to say. They oreviously made the Formula 1 documentary series Drive To Survive.

Players come on to the tour from all kinds of backgrounds, often they can be driven by chips on their shoulders and they have to do it every week. It comes down to what goes on between the ears. We’re going to show that they still have daily worries like everyone else. But elite athletes can focus and shut everything else out. Everything else goes out of the window and they’ve wirked so hard to get out there.

We think the docuseries will be a chance to subvert expectations. We have 5 minutes to get you hooked, We saw with Drive to Survive how it ignited a new following in the sport because Netflix is a huge global platform reaching 250 million households So we’re expecting new fans to come from it.

It’s going to be dramatic storytelling inside the professional world, Fans will see another side that they haven’t seen before. It’s for everyone though.

Because it is oriduced by independent content creators there’s not the same control but the pg a Tour fully approve of the series and have opened up doors. There’s trust from them as they don’t have editorial control. They provided information on players agents so they could be approached. In the first series, No Rory, Brooks or Mickelson but the door is always open for later involvement.

It’s a massive jigsaw puzzle which needs putting together to tell the story. We want viewers to care about the players, not just the winners but people who come 5th and 6th. Now the doors are open we can build the show, new players can come on board at any point. We still want it to be interesting and relevant a year from now.

Because of the demands on their time golfers can mistakenly be perceived as robots with o worries or anything going on in their lives. We will show the human side to all that.

Fresh from an American win in the President’s Cup, Justin Thomas taught host Jimmy Fallon his key swing moves on America’s top rated chat show.

Chief Operating Officer of LIV Golf Atul Khosla announced today a strategic alliance between LIV Golf and the Middle East and North Africa Tour which will mean that LIV golfers will start to earn Official Golf World Ranking points from this week at their event in Bangkok.

The MENA Tour, established in 2011, is a developmental tour which has 54 hole events and acts as a pathway for players to join the Asian Tour. Since 2016 its tournaments have been recognised for official world ranking points.

Atul Khosla said “we are taking this mutually beneficial action to support the game at the developmental level. Because of the i portance and fairness of LIV golfers qualifying for world ranking points we are pleased to create pathways whichgive more opportunities for young players and give players rankings to include all the best golfers”.

Well, that’s an odd way round it. Very few of the current crop of LIV golfers can be called young players. The stand out exception being 19 year old Shergo Kurdi, whose career I have followed since he was a junior player in Surrey. Shergo is a perfect fit for LIV, as his father is from Jordan and Shergo has represented his country internationally. So unless this reasoning is to include new signings straight out of American colleges, it hardly fits those golfers who have gladly joined LIV in the twilight of their careers. I know there’s more than one way to skin a cat, bit this seems an odd alliance to get their top players back into the OWGR scheme.

The implications are huge. Eligibility for all the top events and majors, Presidents and Ryder Cup teams going forward if this works.

So, LIV Golf have overcome this obstacle. There are now two more problems to solve. A pending, accrimonious court case against the PGA Tour and the ongoing lack of TV exposure.

It seems that if LIV Golf can’t win by heading straight forward, they find a way round it. Not announced yet, but the likelihood of LIV Golf paying Fox Sports to show their tournaments draws ever closer. What is odd about this is that Greg Norman was let go by Fox Sports after a short USGA seasonas a commentator. But now he is paying them to show LIV golf.

Their viewing figures on You Tube have been poor, and the galleries look thin. But one thing is certain, you cannot underestimate their determination to make things happen. With bottomless pockets, and a willingness to go round obstacles and find a way to win, LIV is becoming an increasing thorn in proper golf’s side.

Last night, while I was asleep here in London, Judge Beth Labson Freeman was ruling in San Jose California in the first LIV Golf v PGA Tour restraining order case. And she was wondering whether this court case was all bad dream. This was a hastily arranged court date to decide whether LIV players Talor Gooch, Hudson Stafford and Matt Jones could be allowed to play in the FedEx Cup play offs starting this week.

Judge Freeman opened her summing up by asking if the events in the film Top Gun Maverick actually happened or if Tom Cruise’s character had died in the opening sequence and everything after the crash was really a dream?

This set the tone for, what I gather from social media, had been a very entertaining afternoon. Thank you to Rex Hoggard, Joel Beall, Kyle Porter, Rick Gehman, Ryan Ballengee, Sean Zak, Jason Sobel and Daniel Kaplan, who were awake to report what happened. 

The judge ruled against the appeal of Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford and Matt Jones to be allowed to play in the FedEx Cup Play offs beginning at the St Jude Classic on Thursday. 

The main anti-trust court case brought by 11 LIV golfers against the PGA Tour now has a court date of August 7, 2023.

Hopefully this will give LIV time to find a lawyer who actually knows about golf or even geography. Because their lawyer in this case, Robert Walters, seemed unprepared for even discussing basic golf.

He made a number of weird mistakes, including during the recess leaving his mic on so everyone could hear some of his discussions with his team, mention of the broadcaster Brandel Chamblee.

Although representing golfers who had been paid by the Saudi Investment Fund he referred to the Saudi International tournament as being in Riyadh or Jeddah, not where it is actually played in the King Abdullah Economic City. He then placed the Arnold Palmer Invitational in Ohio.

As Kyle Porter from CBS observed he was explaining the complicated relationship between the majors, the Official World Golf Rankings and the FedEx Cup “like he learned about them 3 weeks ago”.

What raised most eyebrows was this. He said: “The FedEx Cup is the Super Bowl of golf”.

He talked about LIV having a 20% market share (though on the basis of fans actually in attendance that would be 0.2% of the market, and also, most of them had not paid to get in anyway).

The judge picked up on this “How can you project a 20% market share and yet call the PGA Tour a monopoly? It is not illegal to be a monopoly. The question is whether the monopoly power is being used against another organisation”

The LIV lawyer also said that the money won in tournaments is recouped against LIV contracts. This is not true. It is separate from the prize money. 

Now, let’s take a breath.

I live in a country where it’s just been announced that our energy bills will reach nearly £4,500 a year in January. I find it absolutely insulting that the plaintiff’s attorney said this about Gooch, Swafford and Jones:

“these three poor kids”

Yeah right. Multi-millionaire kids.

The PGA Tour attorney Eliot Peters quite rightly jumped on this:

“They made a business decision to receive money.  They have made more money in the last two months than they’ve ever made on the PGA Tour. LIV money is way bigger than FedEx Cup money”

The judge was then shown slides which set out the exact amounts of money which Gooch, Swafford and Jones signed for, which were not shown to the court. The judge nodded her head . “Remarkable” she said. “I’m trying to interpret in plain language your regulations and not how you would like them to work”.

She then, in giving judgment for the defendant PGA Tour, said that “LIV contracts are based on the calculation on what they were leaving behind. They lock up these players in a way the PGA Tour never imagined they are so restrictive”

And that is the crux of the matter. Having taken these huge sums of money from LIV each player is tied in to playing (next year) 14 LIV tournaments. They cannot cherry pick where they want to play because the PGA Tour also has a 15 tournament minimum commitment. They can’t just go in and out of the PGA Tour or DP World Tour and do smash and grab appearances to alleviate their boredom with the LIV product.

PGA Tour players can’t just pop up in LIV events as and when they please, just to alleviate their boredom with the PGA Tour product either. This is because LIV is a closed shop. It is by invitation only. This court case highlighted for me how the PGA tour was right to ban the LIV players from their events. Their committed players can’t go in and out of the LIV tour so why should LIV golfers be able to do the same? 

The court case also got blown off course by bringing up Masters Chairman Fred Ridley. It is up to each major championship to decide whether or not to allow LIV golfers into their fields. It looks as though, for now, they will be allowed to play in the four majors.  But that will be the only alleviation of what will inevitably be their boredom with the LIV product and the lack of buy in from golf fans. From where it stands now it looks to me like a massive, very expensive, white elephant.

But as for representing their countries in the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cups? Some very strong words from American Presidents Cup Captain Davis Love III last week, who even talked about PGA Tour players walking out and refusing to play in events where LIV golfers were. Wow. This really sounds like a civil war.

So, first blooding to the PGA Tour in this court case. The main event will take place in August next year. It will take a crystal ball to work out what will happen with that. But I did spot that one of the best psychic mediums in the world answered that question on YouTube on Sunday. Stay tuned for what he had to say.

Speaking to an Australian radio station about Smith and Marc Leishman, unfortunately, they’re gone”.

Cameron Percy, an Australian golfer who just tied for eighth at the Wyndham Championship, did an interview with RSN Radio Australia and all but confirmed Smith and fellow Aussie Marc Leishman are already gone.

If they do in fact make the move, it’ll be interesting to see if they wait until after the Presidents Cup. Smith is No. 1 in the International Team standings while Leishman is 16th.

Both players would be ineligible for the team event if they left after the FedEx Cup playoffs.

This signing seems to be confirmed by an exclusive in the Telegraph. here in the UK.

Cameron Smith refused to confirm or deny his signing in his press conference at the St Jude Classic on Tuesday.

Frank came over to perform at the Caird Hall in nearby Dundee at a time when his career had taken a nosedive. Less than 500 people filled the 2,000 seater Scottish hall. To take his mind off his lack of ticket sales he went off to watch Ben Hogan win the Open at Carnoustie. He was obviously inspired as one hard man watching another. Later that year Frank made the hit film From Here To Eternity, which won him a best actor Oscar and he was back on top again.

This week the Wall Street Journal roke the news of the anti trust court case brought by Mickelson and 10 other LIV tour players against the PGA Tour. In the court documents this exchange of text messages between Sergio Garcia and Greg Norman was discovered, showing Sergio might have been looking to jump ship in February. He has since resigned from the PGA Tour.

Norman then responds with this: “They cannot ban you for one day, let alone life. It is a shallow threat. Ask them to put it in writing to you or any player. Happy for them to speak to our legal team to explain they have no chance of enforcing. Who said there would be a lifetime ban? And to whom? Important to know these facts. I will get something to you to show you why they cannot”.

Garcia replies: “The Commissioner had a meeting with 5 or 6 of the biggest agencies of golf managers, mine included, and first told them that if any of their players had signed with the league they should leave the room. After that they talked about what the tour is going to do going forward and whoever signs with the league they would ban for life.

So these court documents have brought this to light and also that Mickelson was suspended from the PGA Tour, initially for three months, but now until at least March 2024.

Announcements from LIV that it will start properly next year, indicates that there will be some sort of relegation of underperforming LIV golfers so that new players can join the 48. Where will they play if they are banned?

If the 11 golfers bringing this case succeed, they may be creating a rod for their own backs. LIV Golf will have a worldwide schedule of 14 events, and the up front mneu means they must play in every event. The PGA Tour says that they must play a minimum of 15 events. Players like Ian Poulter will also want to play in some DP World Tour events. Plus four majors, possible Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup.

Their argument that they will be playing less, and spending more time with their families, on this basis isn’t true. The will be playing a lot more.

We’ve heard their pre-rehearsed lines in interviews: “I don’t know enough about the subject to comment” “I’m only here to play golf”. Well, perhaps this might get through to them.

I watched a film called The Good Candidate, about a female doctor in Saudi Arabia who wants to get elected as a politician to get things done, but because she’s a woman, she’s oppressed. Meanwhile her Dad, a musician, has a whale of a time swanning round the gulf states having a whale of a time.

And yet, the Saudi’s have allowed a robotic female to become a citizen of Saudi Arabia. See This Morning’s interview with Holly Willouby. It is scary. The robot is made in Hong Kong. Are we going to see robot tournament hosts? They can hand out beers and tell everyone to zip it, even though the whole idea is for golf to become shoutier and louder. It might be safer for robots to engage with the public. Or will it? According to this interview, the more Sophia interacts with humans the more she takes on their traits. So will she be shouting “go in the hole?” “mashed potatoes” “you’re the man”.