We’re all overthinking this whole dueling professional golf tours thing. The simple answer to a complex issue has been readily available to us the whole time, and it goes by the name of John Patrick Daly.
No, JD isn’t replacing Greg Norman as the face of the breakaway LIV Golf Series, nor is he trying to unseat PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan (can you imagine?).
Daly is merely a golf fan who wishes all pro circuits could harmoniously coexist. (On a related note, we may have just stumbled upon a lucrative bumper sticker idea.)
“I just wish maybe they could combine them and make it all work out to where it benefits everybody,” Daly said this week. “And the name of it is golf. I mean, you want to keep golf going and keep it strong, and the foundation of the European Tour and the foundation of the Asian Tour and the Australian Tour and all the tours and our tour, players have kind of built that through a lot of great sponsorships that we’ve had. You know, I just think if they could work it out together it would be really good instead of competing against each other.”
“The concept is great,” Daly continued. “I mean, it would be great if they could just work out for both sides where it becomes, you know, a PGA Tour under their umbrella or a Saudi umbrella, where it works for the money list on our tour and just see what happens that way.”
With all due respect to Long John, there isn’t a big enough umbrella on the planet to make that partnership work. Not even the big red one that floats in the lake at the Travelers Championship.
Still, Daly’s solution does speak to a sentiment some (or many) fans can get behind: is more professional golf really such a bad thing?
