re: Knapp/Valimaki PGA final pairing

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I thought LIV players wanted to play less

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They wanted money. And didn’t want to be patronized and laughed in the face by the pga tour. Jay fricked up. Just own it.

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frick those sell outs” Jay and Pride.

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Where have I once said I blame the players who left?

Adding Jaoco, gooch, Ortiz etc does nothing for the field in terms of interest. I think LIv(and LIv fans), and honestly a lot of PGA fans don’t understand just how niche golf is

The market didn’t need more gold. There was no demand for it. And it shows now more than ever

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The market didn’t need more gold.

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I’m going to assume you meant “more golf”. Nice to see you finally admit it

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The Asian Tour had a better leaderboard than the PGA Tour this weekend

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There is a difference between watching good golf shots being hit and just star gazing.

It was a great battle today between the two leaders with the wind blowing like crazy.

Knapp is one heck of a talent.

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Also the Rahm interview with Marty Smiith was great. He finally just said it was all about the money and dropped everything else. Was a solid interview

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Interesting. I watched the same interview & that’s not what I heard.

He said the money was “obviously a big part of it”. Then he goes on to say he was finally willing to sit down & listen to the other side after the news of the PGA/PIF merger and he probably wouldn’t have made the move if he didn’t win the Masters last year.

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Other younger players, including Rahm & Joaco, wouldn’t mind playing 20x/ year

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John Rahm's number of tournaments played, by year, excluding majors since earning his full tour card.

2022-2023 - 16
2021-2022 - 15
2020-2021 - 18
2019-2020 - 12
2019-2018 - 16
2017-2018 - 16
2016-2017 - 19

Not once in his career has he played 20+ regular tour events. He wasn't going to start now with two kids and all the money he has.

Let's call a spade a spade, with or without the existence of LIV, a number of tour events are going to have weak fields. This is nothing new. LIV didn’t create this problem nor will anything they're doing fix that problem. The best players in the world are never going to play a ton of events each year because they don't need to. The players who do are doing it for financial reasons.

And honestly having signature events with bigger purses is only going to make this problem worse. Only solution IMO to having fewer events with bad fields is to get rid of like 1/3 of the tournaments on the schedule. But if you do that you’re hurting the growth of the game because younger golfers then have an even harder time getting opportunities to move up.

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Well, that seems incredibly misleading since I was including majors in my 20+ number

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He’s playing on average 20 including majors. It’s not misleading at all. He doesn’t keep a busy tour schedule. Never has

If you remove the plus, sure, if it makes you feel better. He wouldn’t be playing in all these tournaments people complain about weak fields either so not sure what exactly you’re trying to prove here

These bigger name LIV guys would be skipping the same smaller events the PGA guys are, just like they were before they went to LIV

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So excluding those & looking at the two league’s schedules - I think it’s fair to say he would easily play 17-18 (21-22) times this year, if allowed.

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Ok let’s pretend he could play both. He has 14 LIV events he’s required to play in plus the 4 majors. Let’s say he plays 2-3 tour events. Don’t you think he’d be playing in events like Bay Hill and not in fricking Mexico? Fields in tournaments like this week are going to suck regardless of what happens with the two tours.

I just laugh when people bring up LIV whenever a tour stop has a weak field as if those fields haven’t always been dog shite. Good golfers haven’t needed to play a ton of events to make a lot of money in a long tim, so they don’t and they won’t.