The sorry spectacle of the golfing world tearing itself apart over a megabucks breakaway Saudi league reminds me of something that happened in football more than 20 years ago.
n 1999 Manchester United pulled out of the FA Cup to play in a nothing tournament in South America – and the oldest national football competition in the world has never quite been the same since.
Things got so fraught that manager Sir Alex Ferguson banned some reporters from his press conferences because he got fed up with them asking when the club would reverse its decision.
United never did, of course, and eventual FA Cup winners that year Chelsea will always be told: “Yeah, but you never beat Man Utd, did you?”
The real damage, though, lay in the fact that the FA Cup competition ceased to be revered as a tournament the biggest clubs always wanted to win, playing their strongest team in every round.
It is true that the Premier League and Champions League were fast becoming much bigger priorities because of the amount of money on offer, but for the FA Cup the rot set in when United, who were the title-holders at the time, decided to give the competition a miss for a year to play in the 2000 FIFA Club World Championship. It became dispensable.
What’s this got to do with golf, you might ask? Well, as players tee off in the third Saudi-backed event at one of Donald Trump’s courses in the US this week, you need look no further than comments made by a former British No.1 for a striking similarity.
“The Ryder Cup right now, as it sits, is done,” said Tony Jacklin, who won the Open Championship in 1969 and was the Ryder Cup captain from 1983-89. “We’re not going to have a Ryder Cup – it’s a mess.
“If players are getting banned and all of a sudden you’ve got 10 guys you can’t pick, maybe more – who are you going to end up with? It’s not the best of America against the best of Europe, it just becomes any exhibition.”
He was speaking after new Ryder Cup captain Henrik Stenson, who had only just pledged allegiance to the European team, was banned after agreeing to join the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Invitational Series.
Yes, Henrik Stenson. Not the biggest name in golf these days, ranked 171 in the world in fact. But, for Greg Norman’s venture, getting the Ryder Cup skipper is huge scalp.
The same goes for Spaniard Sergio Garcia, a veteran of nine Ryder Cups, who jumped ship last week saying he wanted to play somewhere he feels “loved”. Loves being showered with money, more like.
Fellow Ryder Cup stalwarts Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter are off too.
It made me wonder what Garcia’s hero and mentor as a teenager, Seve Ballesteros, would think of his protégé’s decision. Who can forget those titanic struggles as Seve led the re-emergence of European golf, helping our Ryder Cup team to five wins both as a player and captain?
Garcia was later to recall how Ballesteros took him under his wing as a 15-year-old boy, inviting the youngster to duck under the ropes and walk along the fairway with him during a practice round ahead of the 1995 Ryder Cup.
“I saw some of the European crowds just singing, and the energy I felt – I remember as a 15-year-old, I was there, and I was like ‘I have to be part of this at some point in my life’.”
As Europe’s all-time leading points scorer he certainly did that, but his legacy now looks like being one of those who destroyed the competition.
For Seve it was those fierce stakes that made the game of golf so special.
“I look into their eyes, I shake their hand, pat their back and wish them luck, but I am thinking ‘I am going to bury you’,” he once said.
Ballesteros would never have considered the LIV tournaments to be real golf, where players have a cut after 36 holes. That’s how golfers get their rankings and make their money on the PGA and DP World Tours.
He would have agreed with former World No.1 Ernie Els who said of the Saudi project: “You can’t have a 48-man tour playing no-cut golf and that type of thing and expect the world to take you seriously. Just because you’re playing for $20m a week doesn’t change anything.”
Tiger Woods berated the rebels for turning their backs on what had made them who they are, and also said that the LIV format was not valid in a competitive sense.
He said: “What these players are doing for guaranteed money, what is the incentive to practise?”
As one of golfing’s greats, it’s perhaps no surprise that Tiger loves the legacies of players like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer and how he will be compared to them. But with the prospect of today’s rebels being shut out of the majors, those comparisons may soon no longer be there.
Just as Alex Ferguson reacted angrily at reporters pestering him with questions about the FA Cup, so too are the current batch of Saudi rebels. No-one likes being put on the spot for what they are doing – or rather undoing – when they know it is wrong.
Cameron Smith snapped at a reporter who asked him about joining LIV after his win at St Andrews earlier this month. “I’ve just won The Open and you’re asking about that?” he reacted.
Sky News reporter Jamie Weir said he was told to “go f*** myself” and that it was a “f***ing s**t question” when he asked a player how he felt about playing in potentially his last Open.
Ten years on, Ferguson admitted ‘regret’ over pulling Man Utd out of the FA Cup and said the decision was made as a favour to help England’s bid to host the 2006 World Cup.
“It turned out to be a disaster for us,” he said in 2009. “I regretted it because we got nothing but stick and terrible criticism for not being in the FA Cup when really it wasn’t our fault”.
The golfers, of course, have no one else to blame apart from their own greedy selves.
Smith tried to dodge personal responsibility by saying any decision would be down to his backroom team as if he has no say on which direction he goes or its impact on the sport which brought him fame and wealth, let alone the questionable moral ethics of supporting a regime with a toxic human rights record.
A decade from today, I wonder what people like him will think while they count their millions.
It depends on how everything pans out, whether some kind of compromise can be made whereby, as Els suggests, LIV can “have their fun” in the three-month closed season when the ‘real’ golf finishes.
Or if the Saudis pursue their ultimate goal of a Formula One-style league with individuals and teams fighting it out all year long.
If it gets to that, then whatever top golfers they attract will not have time in their calendars to play on the PGA or DP World Tours, whose survival will therefore depend on what talent they can retain.
To use the footballing analogy, while we’re currently looking at an FA Cup-style hit on the Ryder Cup, it could get as bad as what the European Super League threatened to do to the Premier League and Champions League.
In which case, it may well come down to the fans. They saved football, for now. Can they save golf too?
Anthony Harwood is a former foreign editor of the Daily Mail.
