Norman Leaves Mixed Liv Golf Legacy

SAy what you want about Greg Norman – and a lot has been said about him over the years – but he did his work for Liv Golf.

Norman, who announced last week that he left Liv Golf after four years as CEO and, most recently, as an advisor, gave the new competition a presence whose personality and business style fit the daring intention to reform the landscape of Professional Golf.

The Pro game remains divided and the brash style of Norman rarely promoted goodwill, but four years in the new paradigm of the game it seems clearer than ever that finding a compatible compromise was almost impossible. That is why Norman still leaves a controversial work in progress with Liv Golf.

To do what Liv Golf did, it needed an aggressive leader who was not afraid of being disturbing. Norman has always been confident and Liv Golf needed that to challenge the traditional structure of the game.

There were times when Norman went over the top. His “certainly your joke” letter to PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan suggested that the Tour had no legal status to ban players who signed with LIV, an example of the antagonistic attitude that made it more difficult for Norman to sell the audience on Liv Golf.

Norman understood that, despite the billions by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Aarabia in Liv Golf, it was easier to buy players than to buy fans, although he has always believed in what he sold.

Liv Golf continues to struggle to find a grip in the United States and it is possible that it has found its level here. If so, it has failed.

Every idea that it would compete with the PGA Tour has been relaxed and there is a growing feeling that the two organizations are satisfied to go their own way.

But Norman believed in the global vision and that is the basis of what success Liv Golf has had. For more than 30 years, Norman has argued for a world tour and Liv Golf has helped him to achieve that goal, although not with the universal support he might have suggested.

When announcing his departure from Liv – Scott O’Neil, Norman replaced earlier this year as CEO – said Norman:

“Together we built a movement that changed the game worldwide. We have created opportunities for both players and fans and [broadened] The Golf ecosystem. We really globalized the game and have extended the range from golf to fans all over the world.

“We have brought entertainment, innovation and private equity in Golf (including the PGA Tour) that positioned the sport as an asset class. It was an incredible chapter and I am so proud of what we have achieved. My dedication to do what was and still is, the right for Golf, the players and fans never falter.”

“We never went on our way with any story or something that we want to destroy the PGA Tour, the European Tour, but they came out and said they want to destroy LIV. That disappointed me most.” – Greg Norman

Whether professional wave is better, can be discussed, but there is no doubt that the arrival of Liv Golf has yielded a financial windfall, not only for the players who jumped to the new competition, but to PGA Tour players, especially those at the top that now have so many $ 20 million events that they do not feel obliged to play them all.

Since he splashes the professional golf scene in the 1980s, Norman is one of the most fascinating characters in the game. Due to his often combination approach to promoting Liv-Golf, the size of Norman’s gaming career is overshadowed, but it is not possible to deny how much he has achieved as a player.

No other than how he had surgery in business and in particular with LIV, Norman brought a rare style to the game. He was flamboyant winning or losing and he was 331 weeks (more than six years) on top of the world ranking, second all time for Tiger Woods.

Norman crashed in the nineties with the PGA Tour and it felt like he was wearing his frustration in his time at LIV. Listening to Norman sometimes made it seem that he not only sold a new vision of professional wave, but intended to extract a degree of revenge after the Tour had rejected his world tours alone to create the World Golf Championships.

In an interview during breakfast in Doral three years ago, Norman said: “We never went on our way with any story or something that we want to destroy the PGA Tour, the European tour, but they came out and said they want to destroy Liv. That is what disappointed me the most.”

Norman was necessarily aggressive because LIV’s raid requirement. He – and the millions of the Saudis – were convincing enough to convince Dustin Johnson, Bryson Deschambeau, Brooks Koepka, Jon Rahm and Phil Mickelson to join the Crusade.

However, measuring the success of Liv Golf is difficult. It has succeeded in creating a new form of professional wave, but it has not succeeded in winning the American audience and that probably does not seem to change.

The team format is not popular here and how often Joaquin Niemann wins on Liv, it is not comparable to what Scottie Scheffler does on the PGA Tour and does not resonate in the same way.

Perhaps Norman and Liv -Golf have overestimated what they could be or maybe it is still too early to make a definitive judgment. If a change was the ultimate goal, Norman has achieved it.

Maybe that was enough.

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